Evaluation of the communications performance achievable on base station to handheld-terminal radio links with several different practical receive antenna arrays

In this paper, the information extracted from Single-Input Multiple-Output sounding measurements is used to study the effect of several aspects of the receive antenna arrays on system performance. The extracted multipath parameters are used to synthesize the MIMO channel matrices of a hypothesized communication system having a fixed microcellular base-station and a handheld terminal moving throughout the environment, and subsequently study the effect of array configuration on mean effective link gain, eigenvalue dispersion and outage capacity under real-world channel conditions. Three configurations of a dual inverted-F receive antenna array in a generic mobile handset were studied. The work in this paper revealed that on average, the effective power gain of a MIMO link has greater effect on the achievable capacity than multiplexing gain.