Mimo – a Solution for Advanced Wireless Access?

The application of Smart Antenna technology to wireless communication systems has attracted considerable attention over the last decade or so, as a means of capacity enhancement. Here, the application of space-time processing using a single antenna array at the base-station has been considered in order to obtain interference reduction (both co-channel and multi-path) as well as range extension. More recently, the application of dual antenna array architectures to create multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configurations, has attracted considerable interest both within academia and industry as a means of providing significant capacity gains over conventional array based enhancement methods. This paper provides an introduction to these MIMO communication systems and explains how such capacity gains can be achieved using this technology.