Measurement based mutual information analysis of beam steering in the 60 GHz band

This paper presents the performance evaluation of a system using beam steering technique at RX, based on 60 GHz MIMO measurement data. The mutual information of this system is compared to the one of a traditional MIMO system, considering ideal and realistic phase shifters. It is found that with lossless phase shifters and power combiner, the mean mutual information obtained by selecting the best beam out of 5 is higher than the one of 2times2, 3times3 and 4times4 MIMO at low SNR. When considering realistic components, the mean mutual information obtained by selecting the best beam out of 5 is only higher than the one of 2times2 MIMO at low SNR. In both cases (with lossless and realistic phase shifters) MIMO outperforms beam steering at high SNR.