Impact of multipath angular distribution on performance of MIMO systems

The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of multipath angular distribution on the channel correlation and performance of MIMO systems. A full breadth of AOA models is used in this study, and they cover most scattering scenarios of the physical propagation channel. Closed-form expressions for parameters and corresponding correlation of these AOA models are derived. A simulation model was developed and extensive Monte Carlo simulations were performed to obtain the MIMO channel capacity, correlation, and diversity gain for various scenarios. Two major results are (i) the distribution shape has minor impact on the correlation, capacity and diversity gain; the major impact is due to the angular spread; (ii) the continuous and impulsive distribution have dramatically different impacts on the correlation, capacity and diversity gain.