SNR Performance Analysis of Reconfigurable Antennas

Reconfigurable antenna arrays offer advantages over traditional antenna selection in terms of requiring fewer physical antennas and the use of fixed antenna feeds. Hence, in this paper we analyze the signal to noise ratio (SNR) improvement offered by reconfigurable antennas and compare it to traditional selection. Both the distribution and the mean value of the link gains in a reconfigurable system are derived and used to gain insight into system performance, both for SNR gain and outage. Results demonstrate that for systems with up to four antennas and two radiation states, reconfiguration can provide at least 76% of the improvements offered by selection.