Dynamic Metasurface Antennas for Higher-Order MIMO Systems in Indoor Environments

We propose a MIMO system using a dynamic cavity-backed metasurface antenna (DMA) as a transmit antenna to improve the channel capacity of indoor MIMO channels. The DMA is a printed cavity loaded with tunable metamaterial radiators and fed by radio frequency ports. The DMA can generate radiation patterns that are adaptive to MIMO channels by individual tuning of the metamaterial radiators. In this letter, we study a 4 × 4 MIMO system operating at 5.9 GHz, consisting of a simulated DMA as transmit antenna and a linear dipole array as receive antenna. Using a ray tracing technique, we simulate indoor MIMO channels and compute MIMO channel capacity at different receiver locations. We demonstrate that the adaptive radiation pattern generated by the DMA can increase the channel capacity. The MIMO system using the DMA can be low cost and low in power consumption, and can find applications where bandwidth, power, and cost represent constraints.