A Measurement-based performance evaluation of a tri-polarized MIMO antenna in a reverberation chamber

A co-located tri-polarized dipole (TPD) antenna with low mutual coupling is proposed and fabricated in this paper. The TPD antenna has a measured isolation performance better than -25 dB over the working bandwidth of 2.35-2.53 GHz. Furthermore, the correlation coefficients of the TPD MIMO channel are measured in a lossy and non-lossy reverberation chamber, individually. In both the transmitting (Tx) and receiving (Rx) end, the average values of the correlation coefficients in the two cases are about 0.33 and 0.11 respectively, which indicates that the TPD MIMO antenna has a good multiplexing performance. More importantly, we have found that except for the signal correlation, the relative path loss is also very important in the MIMO capacity comparison in different propagation scenarios. It is shown that in the lossy and non-lossy reverberation chamber, the TPD antenna have similar multiplexing performance; however, if the relative path loss is included, the MIMO capacity in the lossy reverberation chamber is obviously smaller than that in the non-lossy one, with the same Tx and Rx antenna.