Increasing handset performance using True polarization diversity

Valenzuela-Valds, Juan F.
EMITE Ing Edificio CEEIM. Campus Espinardo E-30100 Murcia , SPAIN [email protected]
Abstract While many different simulation tools are available to compute MIMO capacity and diversity gain system performance, few works tackle the problem from the measurements standpoint. In this paper, several measurements of MIMO capacity and diversity gain performance of dipole antenna arrays are performed through the use of a reverberation chamber, which includes many effects present in real MIMO channels but generally avoided in simulations. Results show that polarization diversity can be effectively combined to spatial diversity even for Rayleig-fading MIMO scenarios to achieve increased diversity gain and MIMO capacity. Index Terms Diversity gain, MIMO, spatial diversity, polarization diversity, reverberation chamber.

Snchez-Hernndez, David A.
Technical University of Cartagena Plaza del Hospital, 1 E-30202 Cartagena, SPAIN [email protected] including delay and signaling constraints and the statistical nature of the channel. The instantaneous channel capacity for MIMO systems is well defined by,

SNR det I R + bits/s/H z (1) * H * H ' C MIMO = log 2 T

The system has T antennas at the transmitter and R antennas at the receiver and IR is the identity matrix with dimension R. In an independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh environment this capacity can be approximated for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to Cmin(T,R)log2(SNR) bits/s/Hz. This growth potential is extraordinary since each 3-dB increase in transmit SNR will result in roughly min(T,R) b/s/Hz capacity increase in comparison to 1 b/s/Hz capacity gain in single-antenna systems. For correlated Rayleigh-fading environments, however, which represent real scenarios due to lack of scattering at different antenna elements at reception and/or transmission ends, the capacity slope changes as a function of the number of antennas in reception and transmission, among other parameters, and more detailed simulation studies are required and available in the literature [4]. The multipath environment can be generated artificially in a reverberation chamber fed by wall-mounted antennas, which thereby provides a statistically repeatable laboratory-produced environment for characterizing mobile terminals and their antennas. A reverberation chamber is a metal cavity sufficiently large to support many resonant modes (multimode cavity), which are perturbed with stirrers in order to create a fading environment similar to the ones found in indoor and urban environments but with a uniform elevation distribution of the incoming waves. The reverberation chamber can be efficiently used to measure radiation efficiency, which characterizes the performance of single antennas in an isotropic multipath environment according to the above. The received signal becomes then normally (Gaussian) distributed, and from this their associated magnitudes get a Rayleigh distribution, and the phases get a uniform distribution over 2. The system is completed with an elevation distribution factor to account for the larger probability of having waves coming from close to vertical than from close to horizontal directions in real multipath environments and with the use of the embedded element pattern as a way to emulate the fact that for real multipath environments the received signal on each port is transmitted or detected independent of other ports. The chamber can also be used to measure the diversity gain and channel capacities of MIMO antennas with useful and

I.

INTRODUCTION

The improvement granted by polarization diversity in wireless systems is typically obtained by an additional de-correlated channel provided by a polarization state made orthogonal to the existing one, usually at the transmitting end. A randomly oriented linearly-polarized antenna is also typically used at the receiver for evaluating polarization diversity. In this scheme the cross-polarization discrimination (XPD) factor is the usual evaluation parameter, with low correlation coefficients being achieved in LOS and non-LOS situations [1]. Some combinations of two-branch orthogonal polarization and spatial diversity have been reported [2]. In mobile communications scenarios, however, multiple scattering may not be sufficient for a given polarization to decouple half its power into the orthogonal polarization [3]. A recent letter [4] has proposed a novel true polarization diversity (TPD) technique by rotating one antenna by a certain angle with respect to the contiguous element in the MIMO array. In this way an arbitrary angular separation between contiguous dipoles is employed in an equivalent way that an arbitrary spatial separation is employed for spatial diversity. In addition, an accurate prediction of the correlation coefficient between two dipoles separated by both a spatial distance and an arbitrary angular position has not been available until very recently [5]. This has made possible the evaluation of TPD performance for handset MIMO. Results to be presented in this contribution demonstrate that under Rayleigh-fading scenarios TPD can be effectively combined with spatial diversity to nearly double the diversity gain and MIMO capacity for the same available volume. II. MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUE AND SET-UP

The capacity for fading channels can be defined in a number of ways, very much depending upon the amount of channel knowledge made available to the transmitter,

978-1-4244-2517-4/09/$20.00 2009 IEEE

accurate repeatability. Since all excitations and parameters can be weighted, different fading scenarios can also be obtained. With the use of a reference antenna and the MIMO antenna array several MIMO parameters can be evaluated through adequate processing of the measured S-parameters, which are gathered between the measured port and the wall-mounted antennas for all positions of the platform and mechanical stirrers and for all frequency points. The measurement procedure is then repeated for every antenna port, with the uncorrected ports terminated in 50 , for exactly the same stirrer positions and position of the array inside the chamber, and a similar procedure is employed with the reference antenna. Thus, the field environment is exactly the same when measuring every port. S-parameters are first pre-processed on the wall-mounted exciting antennas (Smn) and of the MIMO array antennas (Snn) with a complex averaging over stirrer positions by,

probability level. Channel capacity, also known as spectral efficiency is calculated using the channel estimates hmn in eqn. (5) between each of the MIMO array antenna and each one of the wall-mounted exciting antennas, i.e., a m x n radio channels represent a m x n MIMO system, with n being the number of MIMO array antennas under test and m the number of wall-mounted antennas. With only one wall-mounted antenna the normalized channel estimates form the channel vector becomes,

H 1 x n = [h11

h12

... h1n ]

(6)

For the maximal ratio combining, for instance, the channel capacity C1 x n for the system can easily be calculated as,

C1 x n = log 2 (1 + SNRi =1 h1i )

n

(7)

S mn =

1 N

stirrerpos

S mn

and

S nn =

1 N

stirrerpos

S nn (2)

Where N is the total number of stirrer positions. In fact, averaging is also performed for platform positions and polarization stirring at the users perusal. At low frequencies it is also advantageous to perform averaging over a small frequency band (frequency stirring) to get more independent field samples representing a richer multipath environment. Since some commercial systems like GSM use frequency hoping, this is yet another more realistic emulating characteristic of the reverberation chamber. S-parameters are then normalized to,

For each channel matrix estimates H1 x n, the channel capacity is calculated for a specific SNR range, and all channel capacity estimates are averaged to produce a maximum average channel capacity as a function of the SNR. Maximal ratio combining represents the maximum theoretical capacity and the upper boundary. Since coupling is inherently accounted for in the measurements, mean capacity is then derived by,

C m x n = log 2 (det( I R +

SNR * HmxnHm x n )) m

(8)

Similarly, other MIMO parameters such as the correlation coefficients can also be evaluated in the chamber. III. MEASUREMENT SCENARIOS Reverberation chambers have already demonstrated their ability to reproduce multipath propagation environments typically found in indoor and urban wireless environments [6]. In order to evaluate the full potential of TPD techniques, combined-diversity systems with both spatial and TPD techniques have been tested. Measurements were performed for different 3x6 linear MIMO systems. The diverse scenarios are illustrated in figure 1. The correlation coefficients and MIMO capacity performance were measured for the MIMO array formed by the 3 wall-mounted transmission antennas and the combination of 6 receiving dipole antennas. The only possibility of using conventional orthogonal polarization diversity (OPD) in this scheme is to alternate the polarization orthogonal sate between contiguous elements (VHVHVH). Such a system is really a particular case of TPD with d=90. In fact, the spatial-only diversity scheme can also be considered a particular case of TPD with d=0.

= Smn

Smn 1 ( Smn )
2

1 ( S nn )

(3)

to obtain a better accuracy for the radiation efficiency. The average net transfer function of the chamber becomes,

T=

1 N

stirrerpos

S mn

(4)

S-parameters can also be weighted with mismatch factors before the frequency stirring, and corrected to a reference level corresponding to 100 % radiation efficiency. The processed S-parameters represent estimates of the channel matrix H of multipath communication channels set up between the wall antennas and the MIMO array inside the chamber. Apparent diversity gain for the selection- or maximal ratio combining techniques is obtained from the processed Sparameters by evaluating the cumulative probability distributions of the measured channel samples received at each MIMO array antenna by,

hmn =

Smn eref (1 Snn ) Tref

(5) Figure 1. Tested TPD array schemes

where Tref is the net chamber transfer function for the reference antenna and eref is its known radiation efficiency. The effective diversity gain is the increase from the reference level to the combined signal that is observed at the 1%

IV.

MEASUREMENT RESULTS

Measured correlation coefficients for the linear arrays are illustrated in figure 2 for small element spacing. The correlation coefficients depicted in figure 2 are measured with respect to the first dipole in the array. The results confirmed the enormous potential of TPD for combined-diversity schemes. It is easily observed from figure 2 that the alternating orthogonal polarization scheme (TPD with d=90) has a jigsaw correlation behaviour, which could diminish MIMO capacity. It is also interesting to observe from figure 2 that more general TPD schemes (different from d=90) depict a different correlation pattern with respect to more conventional OPD. Diversity gain measurements were performed in the reverberation chamber for two receiving dipoles separated by both an angular and a spatial separation. Figure 3 shows how the measured diversity gain depend on angular separation d () and wavelength-normalized dipole spatial separation D=(d/). As expected, the combination of both spatial diversity and TPD provided increased diversity gain with only two elements in the array. The combination has a stronger effect when both separations are not large, i.e. when the spatial separation is large (D 0.24), the angular separation can hardly improve the diversity gain, and vice versa when the angular separation is large (d 54), the spatial separation can barely improve the diversity gain. This suggests that a good combination of the two techniques represents the most efficient technique for optimum diversity performance within the same reduced volume made available to the complete array. This is also expected to have an effect on MIMO capacity. Figure 4 depicts the measured MIMO capacities for different combined-diversity systems at SNR=15 dB. All combined-diversity tested systems provide increased capacity with respect to the spatial-diversity-only linear MIMO system. In addition, when the spatial-diversity antenna spacing D is small enough (D<0.07) to provide correlation coefficients over 0.5, a considerable capacity reduction is observed for spatial-diversity-only systems in comparison to combineddiversity systems. It is also interesting to observe from the previous figure that a combination of spatial and TPD techniques performs at nearly full capacity, even for extremely small spatial antenna spacing (D=0.01). At SNR=15 dB and for D<0.02, the combination of spatial and TPD techniques nearly doubles the MIMO capacity of the spatial-only linear MIMO system.

Figure 3. Measured diversity gain (dB) vs. angular separation d () with spatial separation D=(d/) as a parameter for 3x2 MIMO systems.

Figure 4. Measured 3x6 MIMO capacity for diverse scenarios.

V.

CONCLUSIONS

While spatial diversity has already been identified in the literature as an excellent candidate for improving diversity gain and MIMO capacity for wireless systems, results presented in this paper demonstrate that true polarization diversity (TPD) is equally important and particularly significant when combined to spatial-diversity schemes. TPD can be effectively combined with spatial diversity to nearly double MIMO capacity for the same available volume, which could be useful for handset MIMO. VI.
[1]

REFERENCES

[2]

Figure 2. Measured envelope correlation coefficients for D=0.02.

J.J.A. Lempiainen and J.K. Laiho-Steffens, The Performance of Polarization Diversity Schemes at a Base Station in Small/Micro Cells at 1800 MHz, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 1087-1092, August 1998. K. Cho, T. Hori and K. Kagoshima, Effectiveness of Four-Branch Height and Polarization Diversity Configuration for Street Microcell,

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IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 6, No. 6, pp. 776781, June 1998. M. Kang and M-S. Alouni, Capacity of correlated MIMO Rayleigh Channels, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 143-155, Jan. 2006. J.F. Valenzuela-Valds, M.A. Garca-Fernndez,. A.M. MartnezGonzlez, and D. Snchez-Hernndez,, The role of polarization diversity for MIMO systems under Rayleigh-fading scenarios, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, Vol. 5, pp. 534-536, 2006.

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J.F. Valenzuela-Valds, A.M. Martnez-Gonzlez, and D. SnchezHernndez, Estimating combined correlation functions for dipoles in Rayleigh-fading scenarios, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, Vol. 6, pp. 349-352, 2007. K. Rosengren and P.S Kildal, Study of distributions of modes and plane waves in reverberation chamber for characterizacion of antenas in multipath environment, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, Vol. 30, pp. 386-391, 2001.