2x2 MIMO at Variable Antenna Distances

Various publications have drawn a precise picture on how correlation and capacity change when decreasing the receive-antenna distance of a 2 x 2 MIMO transmission to less than 0.1 lambda; however, little is known on how today's commonly employed coding schemes actually perform under such harsh conditions. In this paper, we evaluate - by measurements with a testbed - the uncoded BER over antenna distance performance of: spatial multiplexing, a linear dispersion code, the Golden Code, as well as Alamouti coding. We show, that even at very small antenna distances, a significant gain compared to an ordinary 1 x 2 SIMO transmission can be measured.