Mutual coupling effects on the channel capacity and the space-time processing of MIMO communication systems

The channel capacity and the performance of MIMO systems in the presence of fading correlation and antenna coupling are investigated. Simulation results demonstrate that mutual coupling can improve the performance depending on the inter-element spacing and the richness of scattering. It is shown the bit error rate performance of spatial multiplexing is particularly influenced by the decorrelation/correlation effect caused by mutual coupling. On the other hand, the bit error rate performance of transmit diversity is mainly affected by the resulting modification of antenna gain and received power.