Correlation between elements of a massive MIMO antenna in a sub-6 GHz mobile terminal

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>This work studies the correlation between 14-elements of a sub-6 GHz MIMO antenna for mobile terminal, operating in the 3.10 to 3.85 GHz frequency band. Envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) was used to assess the relationship between MIMO antenna elements. A total of 91 ECC values were considered at every frequency point for the 14-element antenna, which was performed under two propagation scenarios: (i) a uniform environment, and (ii) a Gaussian environment. For the latter, three angular spreads (AS) of 20˚, 30˚, and 40˚ and incident angle of every 10˚ in both elevation and azimuth coordinates are considered. The resulting ECC in the uniform environment is below 0.15 over the entire operating frequency band, indicating that the 14 elements are minimally correlated. However, in a Gaussian environment, the ECC is evaluated at 3.25 GHz. For the AS values of 20˚, 30˚, and 40˚. The average number of ECC values below the 0.3 threshold is 48, 67, and 81 out of 91 total ECC values, respectively. Finally, a relation is derived between the number of ECC values below 0.3 and the lowly-correlated number of antenna elements. It is seen that at a wider angular spread of 40˚, the number of equivalent lowly-correlated elements is 12 with 87% from all considered incident wave directions.</p></div>