Performance Evaluation of Reconfigurable MIMO Systems in Spatially Correlated Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

In this paper, we study the performance of a reconfigurable multiple-input multiple-output (RE-MIMO) system in spatially correlated frequency- selective fading channels. In particular, we propose to use a RE-MIMO system to overcome the inter symbol interference (ISI) problem caused by multipath propagation. In the proposed system, we use a 3-dimensional coding scheme to obtain the same diversity order as in MIMO-OFDM systems over frequency-selective channels, and achieving better bit error rate performance by using directive reconfigurable antennas. To demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system, we compare the performance of the RE-MIMO with MIMO-OFDM system over frequency-selective channels. Simulation results show that the coded RE-MIMO system outperforms the coded MIMO-OFDM systems for small angular spread. However, for larger angular spread, the performance of the RE-MIMO system degrades due to much stronger contribution of undesired multipath components.