Tactical Backhaul Range Extension using MIMO: Investigation based on ITU-R P.530

In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems in increasing the transmission range in tactical backhaul links. We utilize the ITU-R P.530 extensive measurement-based results in order to extract the correlation properties of the long-range line-of-sight (LOS) MIMO channel. Then we use this correlation information to formulate—based on the concept of worst-month outage probability —the improvements that can be achieved by MIMO- MRC (maximum ratio combining) systems. The main findings of this work are as follows. 1) For very low link outage requirement (e.g., $10^{-5}$ outage probability), a 2×2 MIMO system can increase the communication range by about 160% compared to a Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) system —this range extension is almost double what can be achieved when using a 1×2 (Single-Input Multiple-Output) SIMO-MRC system. 2) For comparably moderate link outage requirement (e.g., 10-3 outage probability), the range extension achieved by MIMO is only around 10% higher than what can be achieved by SIMO, but the strong gain is maintained compared to traditional SISO. We demonstrate that, for tactical backhaul links where high reliability is required, MIMO technology provides superior capabilities allowing for significantly increasing the transmission range.