Evaluation of the Isotropic Coverage of an Antenna in a Multipath Environment

Handheld devices as well as various network sensors are expected to keep a constant wireless connectivity whatever their orientation relative to the environment or the access point. In order to assess antenna performances in this context, we propose a novel method for the computation of the antenna coverage over all 3D orientations. Coverage is computed from the antenna far field sampled in every direction. Environment effects are taken into account through the implementation of a statistical multipath channel model. Coverage curves of five well-known antennas are presented for three different environments: free space, indoor line of sight (LOS) and indoor non line of sight (NLOS)