Antenna Correlation and Its Impact on Multi-Antenna System

It is generally believed that antenna correlations of up to 0.5 in magnitude have negligible effects on the performance of multi-antenna systems, and that antenna correlation only affects the system performance via its magnitude. In this paper, we show that antenna correlations of 0.5 in magnitude that has negligible effect in capacity (i.e., theoretically maximum data rate) can cause noticeable degradation on the throughput (i.e., actual achievable data rate); and that, when the number of antennas is larger than two, the phase of the correlation also has an impact on the performance of multi-antenna system. We demonstrated these via simulations and measurements in a reverberation chamber.