On Improving the Performance of Polarization Diversity in Wireless Communication Systems

Conventional polarization diversity suffers from a strong imbalance between the average powers received on its two diversity branches. A new approach is proposed to tackle this problem by pre-combining of the two diversity branches before diversity combining process. Equal average received branch powers thus can be obtained. Theoretical analysis as well as physical interpretation is presented. Two typical types of numerical examples show that the proposed method can be used to improve the diversity performance significantly, especially in the high cross polarization discrimination (XPD) environments