Experimental Investigation of Scatterer‐array‐based Decorrelation Technique Applied to Real Multiple‐input Multiple‐output Base Station

In this paper, a scatterer-array-based decorrelation method for improving the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) performance is proposed for a real application of base station (BS) operating at 780 MHz with a 20-MHz communication bandwidth. The antenna correlation is reduced by loading a scatterer array designed to increase the MIMO array's effective inter-element spacing. As a result, the diversity measure is improved, which in turn benefits the MIMO capacity. This method is demonstrated first in simulation to check its performance, which shows about 4% and 20% improvements in MIMO capacity over 20-MHz communication bandwidth in single-cell and multi-cell scenarios, respectively. Then it is applied to a real BS in a realistic urban micro scenario for experimental verification, showing a noticeable throughput improvement without degrading the power coverage of the BS. Note that this is the first time that the scatterer-array-based decorrelation technique has been applied to increase the MIMO throughput of a real BS in a real-life scenario, which thoroughly demonstrates the promising application potential of this technique.