Robust Performance of MIMO E-SDM Systems in Actual Time-Varying Indoor Fading Environments

Performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems applying the eigenbeam-space division multiplexing (E-SDM) technique may be degraded in time-varying fading environments due to a channel change during the time interval between the transmit weight matrix determination and the actual data transmission. We have proposed some channel prediction methods to compensate for the channel change. Simulation results based on computer generated channels showed better performance when using the prediction methods in rich scatterer environments assuming the Jakes model. However, actual MIMO systems may be used in line-of-sight (LOS) environments, and even in a non-LOS (NLOS) case scatterers may not be uniformly distributed around a receiver and/or a transmitter. In addition, mutual coupling between antenna elements should be considered in actual implementation since it affects the system performance. We conducted MIMO measurement campaigns at a 5.2 GHz frequency band to evaluate the channel prediction techniques. In this paper, we present the experiment and simulation results using the measured channel data. It is shown that robust BER performance is obtained when using the channel prediction methods, and that the performance in LOS environments is better than that in NLOS ones.