Evaluation of performance of multi-antenna terminals using two approaches

In this work, a novel and fast plane-wave based method for evaluation of multi-antenna terminals is presented. This method is shown to be accurate enough for comparing the performance of antenna configurations. The method enables a statistical antenna evaluation without requirements to perform long routes of radio channel sounder measurements with several antenna configurations in several environments. The results of the plane-wave based method utilizing the joint contribution of environmental data and the radiation pattern of an antenna are compared with the results of direct radio channel measurements. The average difference between the methods is below 1 dB in estimating diversity gain of two-element antennas. Further, the maximum difference between the methods in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) analysis is below 1 bit/s/Hz in estimating ergodic capacity.