Study of multi-antenna terminals in the presence of close scatterers

Abstract

Multi-antenna technologies may offer significant increases in data throughput and link range without additional bandwidth or transmit power by using spatial diversity concept. However, the radiation proprieties and return loss of these antennas as well as the channel capacity may be modified by many factors such as close scatterers (human body), mutual coupling, PCB housing, etc. The goal of this study is to characterize the behavior of some multi-antenna prototypes in the presence of these perturbation sources. Most of the antennas are designed to work for 2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz WLAN bands and 2.5/3.5/5.5GHz WiMAX bands and are printed on PCBs of size 114x64 mm2 which follow the average dimensions of PDAs found in the market. Different antennas were designed, simulated and fabricated. In Chapter 4 the results for the circular monopole array antenna is widely detailed. In the Appendix, designs of other antennas simulated and/or fabricated are shown.