Dual Antenna Terminals in an Indoor Scenario

The performance of two different dual antenna hand-held test mobile terminals has been investigated in a realistic indoor office environment and scenario, with respect to antenna performance, diversity combining and Shannon MIMO channel capacity. Measurements of a 2times2 MIMO channel at 1877.5 MHz (narrowband) were performed using a dual-polarized base station antenna. Analyses show that diversity gains, using ideal selection combining and maximum ratio combining, between 0.7 and 4.6 dB was achieved at the 10% outage probability level. Ideal dual-side beamforming (single branch) gives up to 3.3 dB capacity gain compared to single antenna systems at SNR less than 10 dB, however, decreases with rising SNR. Dual branch MIMO capacity gain is only significant at higher SNR above 10 dB. In addition, horizontal polarization at the base station was found to outperform vertical polarization in this scenario