Simple and improved approach of estimating MIMO capacity from antenna magnitude patterns

This paper proposes a simple and improved approach of estimating MIMO capacity from antenna magnitude patterns, i.e., the antenna patterns are phaseless. The simple approach synthesizes the phases according to the antenna spacing, and it compares favorably with an existing approach based on random phase synthesis. Moreover, the simple approach can be improved by taking into account the correlation between the magnitude patterns. The performance of the existing and proposed approaches in estimating MIMO capacity is investigated for dipole antenna systems with different gain and correlation characteristics, under different conditions of antenna spacings, impedance matching networks and propagation scenarios. It is found that an average capacity estimation error of under 0.5% is achieved for the proposed approach, as compared to up to 20.6% error for the random phase approach.