Empirical comparison of MIMO antenna configurations

By now, it is well known that multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications systems are able to bring considerable performance gains for wireless communications. It is also evident that both the propagation channel and the antenna characteristics influence the MIMO capacity. In this paper, we consider the problem of comparing MIMO antenna configurations using measured radio channels. We introduce a new figure of merit called mean effective link gain (MELG), which characterizes the signal power transfer properties of a MIMO antenna system. We emphasize the importance of proper normalization of the results when comparing different MIMO antenna candidates. Evaluation examples with synthetic and measured channels illustrate the usability of the proposed methods.