Measurement of capacity enhancement with parasitic reconfigurable aperture antennas in interference-limited scenarios

The potential of capacity enhancement with a parasitic reconfigurable aperture (RECAP) antenna is investigated through a measurement campaign in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS conditions in an indoor laboratory environment. Measurements are performed using a 5×5 parasitic RECAP for a bandwidth of 70 MHz centered at 2.55 GHz. Both noise-limited as well as interference-limited cases are considered with a varying level of interference under two different realistic power constraints: average receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and fixed total transmit power. For RECAP optimization a simple genetic algorithm (GA) is implemented and its performance is compared with that of a random search. Measurements confirm that a large increase in capacity is possible especially for the case when there is high interference present.