Effectiveness of short-range MIMO using dual-polarized antenna

Short-range Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (SR-MIMO) transmission is an effective technique for achieving high-speed and shortrange wireless communication. With this technique, however, the optimum aperture size of array antennas grows when the transmission distance is increased. Thus, antenna miniaturization is an important issue in SR-MIMO. In this paper, we clarify the effectiveness of using dual-polarized planar antennas as a means of miniaturizing SR-MIMO array antennas by measurements and analysis of MIMO transmission characteristics. We found that even in SR-MIMO transmission, the use of dual-polarized transmission enables higher channel capacity. Dual-polarized antennas can reduce by two thirds the array area that is needed to obtain the same channel capacity. For a transmission distance of two wavelengths, the use of a dual-polarized antenna improved the channel capacity by 26 bit/s/Hz while maintaining the same number of transmitters and receivers and the same antenna aperture size. Moreover, dual-polarized SR-MIMO has a further benefit when zero-forcing (ZF) reception without transmit beamforming is adopted, i.e., it effectively simplifies hardware configuration because it can reduce spatial correlation even in narrow element spacing. In this work, we confirmed that the application of dual-polarization to SR-MIMO is an effective way to both increase channel capacity and enhance transceiver simplification.