Spatial Degrees-of-Freedom of 60 GHz Multiple-Antenna Channels

This paper studies the potential of spatial multiplexing for measured 60 GHz radio channels by estimating the number of eigenchannels. It is well-known that the number of available eigenchannels is dependent on a propagation channel condition as well as antenna array conguration. We evaluate a spatial degrees- of-freedom (SDoF) metric that depends on the propagation conditions and the antenna aperture size, but is otherwise independent of the realization of antenna elements on the aperture. The SDoF metric is a measure of the effective number of antenna elements for spatial multiplexing. We evaluate the SDoF for 60 GHz multiple-input multiple-output channels measured in a conference room environment under a line-of- sight (LOS) condition. Our analysis reveals that the SDoF is more than one for a transmit- receive antenna separation of more than 2 m, which indicates that spatial multiplexing can work in such LOS scenarios. Our results indicate that using only 10 antenna elements at each of the transmit and receive antenna aperture is sufficient for effective spatial multiplexing performance in the considered propagation scenario. Furthermore, by using just 5 antennas at each aperture, eigenchannels down to -15 dB relative magnitude can still be captured.