Analysis of mutual coupling effects on channel capacity of Rician MIMO channel

A common assumption in the study of MIMO communications systems is to consider Rayleigh fading between transmit-receive antennas as independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). In practice, however, the deficient antenna spacing and the lack of scatterers reduce the capacity as well as the performance of the space-time processing due to increased channel correlation. It is generally known that mutual coupling decreases the channel correlation. In this paper, we analyze the channel capacity for the configuration of MIMO antenna with existence of mutual coupling under the condition of the Rician channel. In contrast to the Rayleigh channel with rich scatterers, the Rician channel occurs in case that one of the paths, typically a line-of-sight (LOS) signal, is much stronger than the others, known as non-line-of-sight (NLOS) signals.