Investigation of polarization effects in indoor radio propagation

Discusses the relative merits of vertical, horizontal and circular polarized (CP) transmission for wireless applications in an office environment. Complex path loss was measured at a fixed frequency of 813 MHz, using various transmit and receive antenna polarizations with microwave patch antennas. The effect of polarization on path loss, fading behaviour and diversity performance was assessed. The path loss variation due to polarization was less than ±4.1 dB; horizontal antennas giving an improvement of about 3 dB over vertical. For CP antennas of the same sense, the probability of fades greater than 10 dB below the mean was reduced, based on a count of all sample points; other polarization combinations were however better than circular at 50% of the measured locations. Polarization diversity was found to be more advantageous in improving fading statistics that CP alone