Depolarization Due to Scattering on Walls in the 5 GHz Band

A measurement campaign has been designed and developed to test the polarization behavior of different obstacles when a 5 GHz radio wave reaches their surfaces from different angles of incidence, with two orthogonal polarizations in transmission. The measurement outcomes have been analyzed by means of a matrix procedure, which is inspired in the polarimetric matrix formulation. This method allows the computation of depolarization indexes. The results highlight a strong depolarization of waves. A set of depolarization indexes for specular direction is given for several angles of incidence and three different materials, with direct application to wireless local area networks planning. These results are interesting for radio systems planning to double the channel capacity, if orthogonally polarized transmissions are used, or to mitigate the signal fading, if diversity techniques are applied at reception.