An evaluation of the channel capacity of MIMO systems with practical compact antenna arrays

The channel capacity characteristics of different multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems are investigated. Both statistical and deterministic channel models for outdoor and indoor wireless communications are studied. Practical two-element compact monopole arrays with decoupling networks are utilized for the evaluation. For the deterministic model, a ray tracing tool is deployed to track the channel matrix. It is found that for different decoupling strategies, the obtained channel capacities are different as well, e.g., the array with good angular diversity shows better performance for indoor wireless communications.