Indoor Channel Capacity Measurement of Wide-Band MIMO Antenna with Isolation Enhancement

In this paper, indoor channel capacity measurements are performed for 2-element wide-band multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system using two Lyrtech software defined radios (SDR) platforms. The wideband antenna system operates over a frequency band between 1870 MHz to 2530 MHz while the channel capacity measurements are performed at 2.45 GHz WLAN band. The measurements are performed for both line-of-sight (LOS) and Non-LOS (NLOS) environment. At 20 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the measured channel capacity is 7.22 bits/sec/Hz in LOS and 7.88 bits/sec/Hz in NLOS indoor environment compared to 11.34 bits/sec/Hz for an ideal 2x2 MIMO system. Ground (GND) slots between antenna elements are utilized to enhance isolation by 5 dB in the desired band of interest.