Effectiveness of cover and reflector in receiver antennas for MIMO line-of-sight channels

Space division multiplexing (SDM) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is effective in increasing communication throughput. However, the throughput degradation occurs in poor multipath and line-of-sight (LOS) channels due to high spatial correlation. This paper presents effectiveness of cover and reflector in receiver antennas to overcome the throughput degradation in MIMO LOS channels. We compare communication characteristics of farm, grove, passage, and corner conditions and report that parameters of SNR, spatial correlation coefficient and received power ratio are important to prospect actual throughput rather than eigenvalue difference. The farm condition resulting in the lowest throughput has a high SNR, however induces a high spatial correlation coefficient which is close to 1. According to the aforementioned results, cover and reflector is fabricated to decrease the high spatial correlation coefficient and keep the received power ratio between received antennas. By using the cover and reflector, the farm condition has recovered almost the same throughput as the passage condition.