Evaluation of user hand and body impact on multiple antenna handset performance

From our experimental investigation of multiple-antenna performance and user impact of a realistic mobile terminal setup, we find that apart from the important loss of efficiency due to the user hand, the impact on the individual antennna elements and the directional impact of the user body shadowing have quite small influence on the diversity and capacity performance. It is found that the top and bottom placement of antennas within the handset case are the most efficient to be used with up to two antenna elements. There are, however, significant diversity and capacity gain that can be explored by using four distributed antennas even if only two radio chains are available through hybrid selection and combining schemes. It was also found that the practical method of choosing antennas based on signal power for 2 branch MIMO with 4 available handset antennas, performs well compared to the optimal solution.