Impact of Polarization Characteristics on 60-GHz Indoor Radio Communication Systems

This letter presents experimental results for the polarization impact on 60-GHz indoor radio communication systems. Different transmit and receive antenna polarizations (linear polarizations with different electrical field vector orientations and circular polarizations with different handedness) were used to analyze the degradation in the received signal power due to nonoptimally matched polarization characteristics between the transmit antenna, the propagation channel, and the received antenna. Different signal propagation paths including line-of-sight (LOS) propagation and first- and second-order reflections were investigated. It was found that the degradation due to polarization characteristics mismatch could be as large as 10-20 dB. Polarization characteristics of the transmit and receive antennas providing maximum received signal power were found to be dependent on the type of the signal propagation path. The most robust antenna polarization configuration was identified as a configuration using linear polarization at one end of the communication link and circular polarization at the other end, giving the degradation relative to the optimally matched case of 2-3 dB only.