Evaluation of two-to eight-element antenna array in mobile terminal

An extensive evaluation of practical 3400-3600 MHz multi-element mobile antennas (MAs) have been performed in indoor propagation environments. The overall performances are assessed by means of average efficiency and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) capacity. The study covers both uniform and actual multipath environments with consideration of user´s interaction. The number of antenna elements is varied from two to eight to analyze the impact of the number of antenna elements on the foregoing performance metrics. While in an uniform environment the maximum MIMO channel capacity is obtained with the eight-element antenna array, measurements in real scenarios show that the maximum MIMO channel capacity is in practice obtained with a lower number of elements.