Capacity Evaluation of LoS-Optimised and Standard MIMO Antenna Arrays at 5.2 GHz

In this paper, the channel capacity of MIMO communication systems is evaluated from measurements in a home environment at 5.2 GHz. The capacity performance of a novel line-of-sight (LoS)-optimised antenna array architecture is investigated and compared to that of standard MIMO antenna arrays with one-wavelength inter-element spacing. Several transmit/receive locations are taken into account including LoS, non-LoS and obstructed-LoS areas. The results reveal that the proposed architecture can offer a significant capacity increase (more than 50%) in LoS environments compared to standard MIMO arrays. On the other hand, in non-LoS scenarios the performance of the proposed array is similar to the standard architecture.