Spatial Correlation and Ergodic Capacity of MIMO Channel in Reverberation Chamber

Abstract

It has previously been shown that a reverberation chamber can conveniently be used to measure ergodic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) capacity for over-the-air (OTA) tests. However, the MIMO channel in the reverberation chamber has not been fully studied before. In this paper, the spatial correlation of the MIMO channel in the chamber is studied by comparing the measured channel with two popular MIMO channel models. It is shown that the models can accurately predict the ergodic MIMO capacity of the channel in the reverberation chamber, but not the outage capacity (especially at high signal-to-noise regime). It is verified that the capacity estimation error is due to the fact that the measured MIMO channel in the chamber does not satisfy multivariate normality (MVN), which causes the capacity error increases additively with MIMO size and multiplicatively with signal-to-noise (SNR).