Measurement of keyhole effect in a wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel

It has been predicted theoretically that for some environments, the capacity of wireless multiple-input multiple-output systems can become very low even for uncorrelated signals; this effect has been termed "keyhole" or "pinhole." In this letter, we present the (to our knowledge) first measurement of this effect. The measurements are done in a controlled indoor environment, with transmitter and receiver in two adjacent rooms. One of the rooms is shielded, and propagation to the other room can occur only through a hole or a waveguide in the wall. We find that only the waveguide leads to an unambiguous keyhole, while a hole of the same size still allows multimodal propagation. Measurement of amplitude statistics also confirm theoretical predictions.