Simulation of MIMO channel capacity with antenna polarization diversity

Abstract

A simulation study of the channel capacity of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system exploiting multiple polarizations is carried out. We focus on a simple yet realistic trimonopole antenna structure, taking into account all the mutual coupling and casing effects using the computational electromagnetics solver-numerical electromagnetics code. Simulation results show that, with a special transmit geometry, using the collocated trimonopole antennas at a size-constrained receiver can offer channel capacity that approaches the capacity of an uncorrelated MIMO Rayleigh channel. In addition, it is shown that the capacity increase is mainly attributed to polarization diversity instead of pattern diversity. Furthermore, we find that the mutual coupling and casing effects in the trimonopole system can actually provide a large capacity increase with less constraint on the antenna configurations than the idealized tridipole system.