Impact of angular spread and number of multipath clusters on MIMO channels

This work studies the dependency of MIMO performance figures on two characteristic multipath cluster parameters, the innercluster Angular Spread of Arrival (ASA) and the number of clusters. Both these parameters play a vital role in geometric based stochastic channel models as from the WINNER or COST families. Our motivation to the study these parameters is two-fold. First, we study their impact on the changing statistics of channel transmit and receive side correlations. Second, we will investigate their impact on the single user MIMO channel capacity. We present a detailed analysis for different MIMO order setups with both single as well as dual polarized antenna elements under Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-LOS (NLOS) propagation conditions. One key result is, that the number of clusters is more dominant than the angular spread of it. This empirical investigation considered a 3D extension of the WINNER channel model and the urban macro cell scenario at a center frequency of 2.53 GHz.