Experimental Comparison Between a Conventional and a Distributed Indoor MIMO System

This paper compares conventional and distributed MIMO systems from a measurement campaign. The environment chosen was a laboratory from the Technical University of Cartagena. There are many scatters in this laboratory, so it is favourable for the implementation of a MIMO system as the capacity would be high. Different configurations of the transmitter are studied for both systems in order to obtain the optimal one. The channel sounder used is based on a Multiport Network Analyzer (MNA) and a fast switch. The measurement process is controlled by a laptop. Results of mean capacity and Complementary Cumulative Distribution Functions (CCDF) of capacity are presented. It can be observed from results that the capacity obtained from the distributed MIMO system is around the capacity of an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) fading channel. In the case of using a conventional MIMO system, the capacity obtained for the λ and the 2λ element separation configuration is similar, but when using the λ/2 element separation the capacity is low.