MIMO ANTENNAS FOR A TERRESTRIAL POINT-TO-POINT WIRELESS LINK: FROM THE OPTIMUM ANTENNA SPACING TO A COMPACT ARRAY

Multiple-input- antennas are investigated for terrestrial point-to-point wireless link. The lack of rich scatters in a terrestrial wireless channel results in an ill-conditioned channel matrix for a long range link with compact arrays, which can cause a high bit error rate. This paper demonstrates that the channel matrix can be improved by carefully selecting the antenna spacing. Unfortunately, an optimum antenna spacing that guarantees a good channel matrix is too large to implement for most long range terrestrial wireless links. On the other hand, a channel capacity study of an 8 8 link reveals that multiple antennas do provide more capacity even with small antenna spacing. Constellation multiplexing is then applied to the compact array conguration to solve the unreliable communication problem. In addition, a multilevel maximum ratio combining technique is introduced to improve detection efficiency.