MIMO performance of a planar logarithmically periodic antenna with respect to measured channel matrices

Abstract

The increasing interest in wireless transmission of highest data rates for multimedia applications (e.g. HDTV) demands the use of communication systems as e.g. described in the IEEE 802.11n draft specification for WLAN including spatial multiplexing or transmit diversity to achieve a constant high data rate and a small outage probability. In a wireless communications system the transmission of parallel data stream leads to multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) systems, whose key parameters heavily depend on the properties of the mobile channel. Assuming an uncorrelated channel matrix the correlation between the multiplexed data streams is caused by the coupling of the antennas, so that the radiation element becomes an even more important part of the system. Previous work in this research area (Klemp and Eul, 2006) has shown that planar log.-per four arm antennas are promising candidates for MIMO applications providing two nearly decorrelated radiators, which cover a wide frequency range including both WLAN bands at 2.4 GHz and 5.4 GHz. Up to now the MIMO performance of this antenna is mainly analyzed by simulations. In this contribution measured channel matrices in a real office environment are studied in terms of the antenna's MIMO performance such as outage probability. The obtained results recorded by using a commercial platform are compared to the simulated ones.