Performance evaluation of 2-element arrays of circular patch antennas in indoor clustered MIMO channels

In this paper we present a computationally efficient method to evaluate the performance of circular patch arrays (CPAs) in clustered MIMO channel models. The proposed method is based on bounds to the eigenvalues of the spatial correlation matrix that are shown to depend only on the channel angle spread. From these bounds, we derive a closed-form expression of the MIMO ergodic capacity as a function of the angle spread, which is used to estimate the performance of CPAs in different propagation environments. This method yields dramatic reduction in computational complexity due to the reduced number of channel parameters required for performance evaluation of CPAs. Simulation results show that through this method it is possible to predict the performance of CPAs, with negligible capacity loss (below 2%), for the most practical channel scenarios