Investigation of the polarization properties of satellite channels with multiple antennas

In contrast to a plane-wave situation electromagnetic wave polarization is a 3-dimensional phenomenon in multipath scatter environments. Recently there is much research work done in order to utilize this fact in Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO) wireless channels [1]. It was shown that with appropriate antenna arrangement increase in capacity can be as much as 6-fold in terrestrial rich scattering environments. In this paper satellite systems are investigated from this point of view. It is shown that it is hard to achieve an increase of capacity. However, diversity gain (or the order of diversity) can be increased and in principle diversity gain of 6 or more is possible while this gain is at most 4 in the 2D (i.e. plane wave) case. The paper focuses on the propagation aspects of a satellite-to-indoor propagation scenario and demonstrates by electromagnetic simulation that exploiting the 3D polarization can lead to considerably improved reception.