Empirical study of higher order MIMO capacity at 2.53 GHz in urban macro cell

This contribution studies the channel capacity of higher order MIMO configurations. The results are based on wide band channel measurements at 2.53 GHz for a representative urban macro cell in Ilmenau, Germany. for single and dual polarized antenna elements configurations from 2×2 up to 16×16 sub channels. Furthermore the analysis is performed for two different base stations heights. Only the 2×2 dual polarized MIMO setup matches the corresponding Rayleigh results. Between the same but increasing numbers of MIMO antennas, an almost constant gap between single and dual polarized setups was found. It was also found out that the results depend on the base station height, the differences in MIMO capacity results increase while the number of antennas is increasing.