Mitigating severe channel effects using tripolar antenna diversity

Machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are already being developed for, as examples, the autonomous health monitoring and energy management of a variety of systems. Given the breadth of potential M2M systems, it is clear that the environments in which they will be deployed will also vary greatly. Among possible environments one can expect are those which are challenging for wireless systems, with multipath and depolarization effects that are not well-captured using existing channel propagation models and/or are not well-mitigated using present antenna systems. This paper presents work in characterizing such channels along and demonstrates the mitigation achieved for a particularly harsh propagation environment using a prototype tripolar antenna.