A Study on MIMO Wireless Communication Channel Performance in Correlated Channels

Abstract

MIMO wireless communication system is gaining popularity by days due to its versatility and wide applicability. When signal travels through wireless link it gets affected due to the disturbances present in the channel i.e. different sorts of interference and noise. Plus because there may or may not be a Line of sight (LOS) path between transmitter and receiver signal copies leaving the transmitter at the same time reaches the receiver with different delays and attenuation due to multiple reflections and interfere with each other at the receiver. Therefore fading of received signal power is also observed in case of a wireless MIMO link. In case of wireless two most important objectives can be channel estimation and signal detection. The importance of the wireless channel estimation can be attributed to faithful signal detection and transmit beam forming, power allocation etc. when Channel state information (CSI) is communicated to the transmitter via feedback loop in case of uni-directional channel or by simultaneous estimation by the transmitter itself in case of bi-directional channel. This text introduces some aspects of signal detection and mostly different aspects of channel estimation and explains why it is important in context of signal detection, beam forming etc. A brief introduction to antenna arrays and beam forming procedures have been given here. The cause of occurrence of spatial and temporal correlations have been discussed and different ways of modelling the spatial and temporal correlations involved are also briefly introduced in this text. How different link and link-end properties e.g. antenna spacing, angular spread of radiation beam, mean angle of radiation, mutual coupling present between elements of an antenna array etc. affects the channel correlations thereby affecting the performance of the MIMO wireless communication channel. Modelling of antenna mutual coupling and different estimation and compensation techniques are also discussed here.