A Tradeoff between Rich Multipath and High Receive Power in MIMO Capacity

Abstract

A discussion about which of the two factors, rich multipath (in NLOS) or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) (usually in LOS), affects the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channel capacity more is presented in this paper. This interesting discussion is investigated by performing simulations using simple circle scatterer model and WINNER II channel model. And the simulation shows that these two factors behave differently as the channel condition varyies. When the scatterer number in channel is low, the high receive SNR is more important to capacity. The multipath richness will have greater influence when the scatterer number exceeds a certain threshold. However, the channel capacity will not change much as the scatterers continue to increase.