Fading correlation and its effect on the capacity of multi-element antenna systems

Abstract

We investigate the effect of fading correlations in multi-element antenna (MEA) communication systems. The enormous capacity of an MEA system can potentially be reduced by fading correlation. To model the narrowband Rayleigh-fading multipath environment, we propose an abstract model. Using this model, the fading statistics can be determined from the geometrical parameters of the MEA and the multipath environment. This, model allows us to directly observe how the choice of antenna geometry affects capacity. We show that the MEA capacity can be expressed as the sum of the capacities of several subchannels, whose gains are affected by the fading correlation. As the fading correlation becomes higher, the disparity between the gains of these subchannels becomes larger and as a result some of the subchannels do not convey information at any significant rate.