Introducing space sampling for OFDM systems with multipath diversity

Multiple receive antennas are known to provide receiver diversity but typically require considerable separation between them. We introduce the concept of space sampling at the receiver where antennas are placed relatively close to each other. Since the antennas are close, the samples are highly spatially correlated and does not help in performance improvement in a typical wireless system with flat fading. However, this concept is very useful particularly in an OFDM system with frequency selective fading which has an inherent multipath diversity. Under these circumstances, the required space diversity for performance improvement is obtained by the transformation of multipath diversity to useful space diversity in frequency domain inherently by an OFDM system (G. V. Rangaraj et al., June 2003). The minimum separation required between the antennas under such circumstances is derived analytically and we have show that even with a separation of only 0.44λ, the required spatial correlation in the frequency domain becomes sufficiently low.