On OFDM systems with spatially correlated antennas in low multipath diversity situations

Spatial correlation is introduced when antennas are not well separated, which typically leads to performance degradation in space diversity systems for flat fading wireless channels. However, in a frequency-selective environment with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multipath diversity can help in overcoming this performance degradation. This is due to transformation of a highly spatially correlated channel impulse response to less spatially correlated channel frequency response inherently by an OFDM system in the presence of multipath diversity . In this letter, we numerically evaluate the minimum antenna separation required for a target spatial correlation in the frequency domain in situations with low multipath diversity. Performance results for two highly spatially correlated receive antennas with such spacing are provided for low multipath diversity channels and it is found to be within 1 dB (at BER=10^-3) of spatially uncorrelated reception for QPSK modulation.