Experimental channel characterization of a MIMO-UWB communication system

In this paper, an experimental evaluation of the performances of a MIMO-UWB system has been described. The results obtained show that only at short distances MIMO-UWB systems exploit a significant multiplexing gain. This is mainly due to the SNR of UWB communications. Since the bit rate of UWB at short distances is already very high, non-negligible improvements can be obtained only at large distances. Consequently, MIMO techniques in UWB systems should be devoted to exploit the diversity gain to increase the communication range. Moreover, it should considered that the variations of the environment conditions could change the working region of the MIMO-UWB system with a decreasing of the achievable gain. In order to avoid such an event, smart techniques should be taken into account to adaptively reconfigure the system itself thus ensuring the best SNR conditions for reaching the optimal gain performance.