Indoor measurement of handset dual-antenna diversity performance

In indoor wireless communications systems, the multipath channel has a significant impact on system design and performance. Antenna diversity is one approach to overcoming the detrimental fading caused by this multipath phenomenon. This paper presents measured performance of three dual-antenna diversity configurations on prototype transceiver handsets in an indoor environment. The statistics of the received signal are evaluated, and the envelope correlation coefficients for the signals received by the antennas are computed. Results from simulations performed using accurate representations of the antenna patterns coupled with a recently developed indoor propagation channel are compared to the measured data. Both the simulations and measurements show the highly decorrelated nature of the received signals, implying that the chosen configurations should provide good diversity performance.