A compact six-port dielectric resonator antenna array: MIMO channel measurements and performance analysis

In English MIMO systems ideally achieve linear capacity gain
proportional to the number of antennas. However, the compactness
of terminal devices limits the number of spatial degrees
of freedom (DOFs) in such systems, which motivates efficient
antenna design techniques to exploit all available DOFs. In this
contribution, we present a compact six-port dielectric resonator
antenna (DRA) array which utilizes spatial, polarization and
angle diversities. To evaluate the proposed DRA array, a measurement
campaign was conducted at 2.65GHz in indoor office
scenarios for four 6 × 6 multiple antenna systems. Compared
to the reference system of monopole arrays which only exploit
spatial diversity, the use of dual-polarized patch antennas at
the transmitter enriches the channel’s DOF in the non-line-ofsight
scenario. Replacing the monopole array at the receiver with
the DRA array that has a 95% smaller ground plane, the 10%
outage capacity evaluated at 10 dB reference signal-to-noise ratio
becomes equivalent to that of the reference system, due to the
DRA’s rich diversity characteristics. In the line-of-sight scenario,
the DRA array gives a higher DOF than the monopole array as
the receive counterpart to the transmit patch array. However, the
outage capacity is 1.5 bits/s/Hz lower, due to the DRA array’s
lower channel gain.