Quantifying diversity and correlation in Rayleigh fading MIMO communication systems

The performance of MIMO systems and the usefulness of the dedicated signal processing and channel coding techniques is strongly affected by the presence of fading correlation. For instance, space-time block coding is favored by low fading correlation, while beam-forming techniques are advantageous at high amounts of correlation. In this paper, we define an easy to compute quantitative description of fading correlation and diversity present in a MIMO channel. This definition offers the possibility to build equivalence classes of channels which offers the same amount of diversity or correlation. It turns out that the channels from such an equivalence class performs essentially equivalent with respect to channel capacity or throughput.