Optimal Front-End Design for MIMO Receivers

The effect of antenna mutual coupling on fading correlation in compact MIMO arrays has received considerable attention. By contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the noise. In this paper we present a circuit model for a noisy MIMO receiver front-end that includes arbitrary coupling and noise correlation. The noise figure for two-port networks is extended to multiport networks, from which theorems for optimal front-end design are derived. Numerical results are presented which provide insight into receiver noise behavior in the presence of coupled antennas.