Impact of Depolarization Phenomena on Polarized MIMO Channel Performances

The performance and capacity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channels are limited by the spatial fading correlation between antenna elements. This limitation is due to the use of mono polarized antennas at receiver and transmitter sides. In this paper, in order to reduce the antenna correlation, the polarization diversity technique is employed. Although the spatial antenna correlation is attenuated for multi-polarization configurations, the cross-polar components appear. This paper highlights the impact of depolarization effect on the MIMO channel capacity for a 4^4 uniform linear antenna array. We assume that the channel is unknown at the transmitter and perfectly known at the receiver so that equal power is distributed to each of the transmit antennas. The numerical results illustrate that for low depolarization and spatial correlation, the capacity of single-polarization configuration behaves better than that of multi-polarization configuration.