Evaluation of diversity and MIMO performance of antennas from phaseless radiation patterns

We investigate the significance of phase information of radiation patterns for the performance estimates of diversity and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna configurations at 2 GHz band. We also propose a random-phasing technique for performance analysis when the phase information is not available. In the performance analysis we use the Experimental Plane-Wave Based Method (EPWBM) where 3-D radiation patterns of the antennas and measured 3-D signal distribution of the propagation environment are combined. The results show that use of phaseless radiation patterns leads to unacceptable underestimation of performance of multielement antenna systems. However, the use of a random phasing technique with phaseless radiation patterns is shown to be an attractive method for simplifying the antenna evaluation process.