Experiments on a MIMO System Having Dual Polarization Diversity Branches

This paper introduces a novel MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) communication system having orthogonal dual polarization diversity branches. We have designed a dual polarized circular patch antenna which has two orthogonal polarization ports such as vertical polarization (V) and horizontal polarization (H) on its metal surface. This design makes it works as two independent antennas in multipath environments. By using two dual polarized antennas at both the transmitter and receiver, we designed a dual-polarization 4 × 4 MIMO experiment system. This system can be used to investigate the performance of various MIMO transmission methods as well as the performance of adaptive algorithms in indoor multipath environments. To investigate the performance of our experiment system, we carried out a number of MIMO transmission experiments such as space-time-coded transmission having two parallel streams and MIMO eigenmode transmission. We will show the results of those experiments and discuss the advantages of using polarization diversity in MIMO communication system for next generation broadband wireless communication. key words: MIMO, polarization diversity, space-time coading, MIMO eigenmode transmission, singular value decomposition (SVD)