Summary
International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation
2012
Session Number:2B2
Session:
Number:2B2-2
Evaluation of Distributed MIMO Antennas for Mobile Terminal
Masakazu Hirokawa, Masaharu Takahashi, Koichi Ito, Issei Kanno, Yoshiaki Amano, Masayuki Nakano, Akira Yamaguchi,
pp.-
Publication Date:2012/10/29
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
Over the past ten years, MIMO transmission, which improves the communication quality and enhances the system capacity within a limited frequency band, has attracted much attention. In utilizing multiple antennas for small mobile terminals, the space arranging the multiple antennas are limited and the distance between them is compelled to be short. Hence, the radiation efficiency and antenna correlation are degraded by the effect of mutual coupling, and the MIMO channel capacity cannot be ideally obtained. In addition, the performance of the antenna is degraded by the effect of the human body in the usage environment of such the terminal. For arranging the multiple antennas with higher efficiency and lower correlation, we have proposed a novel architecture, that the antennas are implemented onto the multiple distributed terminals deployed in a near field and then the signals received by the distributed antennas are consolidated to a specific main-terminal through the wireless communication links between them. As one utility scenario of this architecture, deployment of the two terminals (main and sub-terminal) around a user (human body) can be considered. In this paper, we evaluate the antenna performance with the distributed terminals in the scenario, as well as in the free space, in order to show the effectiveness of the distributed MIMO antenna architecture through the comparison to a single terminal by the computer simulation. Concretely, main and sub terminals, respectively with two antennas, and single terminal with four antennas and human body phantom are modeled and their efficiency, antenna correlation, and MIMO channel capacity are evaluated with the FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) calculation.