Impact of Front-to-Rear Ratio, Side Lobe Level, and Beam Orientation of Base Station Antennas on MIMO Performance

As the device radiating and receiving electromagnetic waves, antennas play a vital role in the wireless communication technology. Therefore, the performance of antennas will greatly affect the performance of MIMO communication. In this paper, we study the effects of some common radiation characteristics of base station antennas, including front-to-rear ratio, side lobe level, and beam orientation, on the performance of cellular communication system. It is shown that the channel capacity increases as the front-to-rear ratio of the antenna element increases, but when the front-to-rear ratio reaches 20dB and above, the channel capacity basically remains unchanged. In addition, with the increase of the side lobe level and/or the offset of the beam orientation, the data rate of the multi-user multi-cell system decreases. This is mainly due to the increased interference.