Analysis of 5 GHz MIMO Antennas for Peer-to-Peer Communications

The performance analysis for realistic 5 GHz multi-element terminal antennas in peer-to-peer communications is presented in three typical indoor usage environments. Double directional experimental plane-wave based method (EPWBM) is used to combine the simulated 3-D radiation patterns of the antennas with large amount of experimental double directional channel data to get MIMO channel matrices that include the effect of the transmitter and the receiver antennas. Mutual information values of different antenna configurations in the studied environments are used in the performance evaluation. The performance of the antenna configurations with good angular coverage is noticed to be clearly better especially at high or average reliability levels than that of the antenna configuration with limited angular range. Generally, the performance of MIMO antenna systems in peer-to-peer scenarios is noticed to have larger fluctuation than in traditional base station scenarios.