Vienna and Bristol undertake collaborative research on Near-Field MIMO

4 May 2012

At the COST IC1004 meeting held in Lyon (3rd to 4th May 2012) a collaborative research activity under taken by members of the Communication Systems & Networks Group was presented to an international audience of industrialists and academics. 

The paper described the joint measurement campaign and analysis of a near-field MIMO wireless communication system undertaken by researchers from the Institute of Communications at Vienna University of Technology and Bristol University.  Nikola Gvozdenovic from Vienna University of Technology visited Bristol in February with financial support from the COST Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM) scheme, to use the Centre for Communication Research anechoic chamber with it’s channel sounder (kindly provided by Toshiba TREL) to record a series of 2 x 2 Ultra Wideband (UWB) MIMO channel responses for a range of transmitter to receiver antenna separations.

Following his visit, and in collaboration with Will Thompson, Geoff Hilton and Mark Beach from the CSN research group Nikola has been able to estimate the mutual information and eigen structure for 6 different antenna configurations as a function of distance. This complements the current body of research focussing on far-field MIMO in the presence of rich scattering and has illustrated that MIMO capacity enhancement is attainable over very short transmission distances as well as the importance of choice of antennas. These early results will be refined to derive channel capacity by optimizing the mutual information.  

Geoff Hilton from Bristol also recently visited Vienna where he has worked with Professor Christoph Meclenbräuker, Philipp Gentner and Nikola Gvozdenovic investigating the ‘Radiation Efficiency Measurement of On Chip Antennas’.