Experimental Verification of Degrees of Freedom for Colocated Antennas in Wireless Channels

It has been postulated that six colocated orthogonally polarized electrical and magnetic dipoles can offer up to six degrees of freedom (DOFs) in a multipath scattering environment. In other words, a sixfold increase in channel capacity can be achieved in the context of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, due to the complexity in designing and measuring such a six-port antenna, to our knowledge, no experimental verification has yet been successfully performed. In this paper, the six DOFs hypothesis is experimentally verified at 77 MHz. The experiment involves the design and fabrication of two six-port arrays. In particular, one array is made compact with colocated antenna elements enclosed in a small cubic volume of (0.24λ)³. Using the two arrays, MIMO channel measurements are performed in an RF shielded laboratory in order to measure a multipath scattering environment. Analysis on eigenvalues of the measured channel shows that six DOFs are attained due to the orthogonality in radiation patterns of the two arrays.