An antenna solution for MIMO channels: the switched parasitic antenna

We investigate the switched parasitic antenna (SPA), which is a novel technique for electronically directing the radiation pattern in a MIMO system. The correlation between the received signal modes is shown to be sufficiently low to yield a diversity gain. The capacity limit using the SPA is investigated for different SPA configurations and it is found that the capacity is comparable with an array antenna configuration in certain situations. Finally, a space time block coding scheme is used to evaluate the bit error rate of a MIMO-SPA system. It is found that the SPA requires a 5 dB higher SNR than an antenna array solution to achieve a BER=10/sup -2/. However, the array antenna requires a radio transceiver for every antenna, as opposed to the SPA which uses only one transceiver.