TSINGHUA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

ISSNl l 1007-0214l l 07/ 17l l pp294-298

Vol ume 15, Number 3, June 2010

Performance Evaluation of a Four-Element Antenna Array with
Selection Circuits for Adaptive MIMO Systems
*

LI Zhengyi (:j), WANG Xuan ( !), DU Zhengwei (|:')
**
, GONG Ke (, )

State Key Laboratory on Microwave and Digital Communications, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and
Technology, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Abstract: Reconfigurable antenna arrays increase the flexibility of adaptive MIMO systems. At present, most
designs have adopted antenna arrays with reconfigurable elements. However, antenna selection is also an
effective method, which has not been fully investigated. In this paper, the potential benefits of a four-element
antenna array with selection circuits in the UMTS band (1920-2170 MHz) are explored. The array has eight
pin-diodes embedded in the feeding network to select any sub-set of elements. For evaluation, an adaptive
MIMO system was set up and a measurement campaign was taken in an indoor multi-path environment.
The measurements were performed over a 300 MHz bandwidth centered at 2.05 GHz, covering the UMTS
band. The results show that different channel conditions prefer different antenna array configurations.
Therefore, in varying channel conditions the antenna array can support antenna selection algorithms to se-
lect the best sub-set of elements to increase channel capacity.
Key words: adaptive MIMO systems; antenna selection; pin-diode; reconfigurable antenna array

Introduction
Adaptive MIMO systems, which are MIMO systems
incorporating link adaptation techniques, have been
recently proposed
[1]
. In these systems, some parame-
ters such as the modulation and coding rate are dy-
namically adapted to the time-varying channel condi-
tions. Then, a new concept was introduced to increase
system flexibility, based on reconfigurable antenna
arrays, which have reconfigurable configurations and
radiation/polarization properties
[2]
. At present, there are
two techniques in this field: one is antenna arrays with
reconfigurable elements and the other is antenna selec-
tion. Several designs have been proposed with the first
technique
[2-4]
, but few with antenna selection.
Compared to terminal antennas, the RF chains, in-
cluding the low-noise amplifiers and downconverters,
are usually quite expensive, and some antenna selec-
tion algorithms have been studied to provide optimal
performance when the number of RF chains is less
than the number of antenna elements
[5]
. Furthermore,
for some particular channels, using the optimal sub-set
of transmit antenna elements can lead to an increase in
capacity. A low rank matrix channel would be a good
example
[6]
. Therefore, antenna selection is an effective
method to achieve reconfigurable antenna arrays for
adaptive MIMO systems. Its theory is to select the best
sub-set of elements from among all the antenna ele-
ments based on some criterion such as the sig-
nal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or capacity
[5]
, so it is a trade-
off between cost, complexity, and multi-antenna


Received: 2008-12-29; revised: 2009-11-30
*
Supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No.
2007CB310605), the National High-Tech Research and Develop-
ment (863) Program of China (No. 2006AA01Z265), the Special-
ized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education
(No. 20060003100), and the Tsinghua-QUALCOMM Associated
Research Plan
**
To whom correspondence should be addressed.
E-mail: zwdu@tsinghua.edu.cn; Tel: 86-10-62784107
LI Zhengyi (:j) et al..Performance Evaluation of a Four-Element Antenna Array with Selection

295
resources.
To achieve antenna selection, the radiation pattern of
each selected element needs to be steady whether other
elements are selected or not. However, this is not the
case for an antenna array with conventional switching
circuits, in which the selected element is connected to
a matched source and the un-selected element is
choked by an open-circuit. Karaboikis et al.
[7]
showed
an example of this where the main beams of antenna
elements are in opposite directions. To overcome this,
Li et al.
[8]
suggested terminating the un-selected ele-
ment to a matched lumped resistor. In that study, a
printed dual-monopole array with selection circuits is
achieved. Moreover, a four-element antenna array with
selection circuits is proposed
[9]
. The antenna array can
select any sub-set of elements with eight pin-diodes
embedded in the feeding network.
In this paper, the performance of the four-element
antenna array with selection circuits is evaluated. At
first, the channel capacity is fully discussed to charac-
terize the performance of adaptive MIMO systems.
Then, an adaptive MIMO system is set up, and a meas-
urement campaign is taken in an indoor multipath
environment.
1 Antenna Array Characteristics
The four-element antenna array with selection circuits
is illustrated in Fig. 1. The antenna array is printed on
the front side of an FR4 substrate board with dimen-
sions 95 mm 60 mm 0.8 mm and relative permit-
tivity of 4.4. The four elements can be further divided
into two pairs. Each pair has two monopoles, which
have the symmetric configuration with the same di-
mensions. Elements 1 and 2 (pair 1), which are located
at the upper part, are two back-to-back monopoles.
Elements 3 and 4 (pair 2), which are positioned at the
lower part, are simple inverted-L monopoles. The main
rectangular ground plane with two holes in the lower
part is printed on the back side of the substrate board,
and treated as the circuit part on the lid of a folder-type
mobile phone. In order to increase the isolation of pair
1 and adjust the resonant frequency, a T-shaped and
dual inverted-L-shaped ground branches are introduced.
The ground stubs for elements 3 and 4 are used to ob-
tain better matching characteristics within the UMTS
band. The detailed geometry parameters were given by
Li et al.
[9]


(a) General view

(b) Schematic of the selection circuit for element 1

(c) Photograph of the prototype
Fig. 1 Configuration of the four-element antenna ar-
ray with selection circuits
With eight pin-diodes embedded in the feeding net-
work, the antenna array can select any sub-set of ele-
ments with the un-selected ones terminated to matched
lumped resistors. In the design, the dc block capacitors
Tsinghua Science and Technology, June 2010, 15(3): 294-298

296
and the RF choke inductors separate the dc signal and
the RF signal in the feeding network efficiently so that
unwanted interference can be prevented. By control-
ling the dc bias of the pin-diodes D1-D8 properly, the
antenna array can change its configuration: the selec-
tion of elements. For example, the schematic of ele-
ment 1 with pin-diodes D1 and D2 is shown in Fig. 1b.
If D1 is forward-biased and D2 is reverse-biased, ele-
ment 1 is selected, while if D1 is reverse-biased and
D2 is forward-biased, element 1 is terminated to a
matched lumped resistor (Rm1). For elements 2, 3, and
4, the conditions are similar.
The pin-diode model number is Philips BAP64-03
and some surface mounted components are utilized in
the current design. The connector in Fig. 1a is for the
purpose of connection to a remote control unit for easy
testing. After simulations, a prototype antenna array
was fabricated and its photograph is shown in Fig. 1c.
Whenever any sub-set of elements are selected, the
measured impedance bandwidth (S
ii
< 10 dB) of each
element within this sub-set will cover the UMTS band.
Meanwhile, across the band, the two largest S
ij
(i

j)
parameters, S
21
and S
34
, are still lower than 11.5 dB
and 16.5 dB, respectively. Furthermore, the measured
radiation pattern of each selected element changes very
little whether other elements are selected or not. Pat-
tern stability is essential for antenna selection.
2 Channel Capacity
In MIMO systems, channel capacity is used to evaluate
performance. When the transmitter does not know the
channel conditions and the power is equally divided to
each transmit antenna element, the capacity is given by
R
*
2
T
log det
N
C
N

( | |
= +
( |
( \ .
I HH (1)
where N
R
is the number of receive antenna elements,
N
T
is the number of transmit antenna elements,
R
N
I is
the N
R
N
R
identity matrix, is the average received
SNR,
R T
[ ]
N N
ij
h

= e H C is the normalized channel
matrix, and
*
{ } denotes the conjugate transpose
[10]
.
Equation (1) is in terms of a narrowband MIMO
system. When the system operates at several
sub-carriers, the capacity should be averaged among
the frequency domain, which is computed as
1
1
m
i
i
C C
m
=
=

(2)
where m is the total number of sub-carriers
[4,11]
.
The (i, j)-th entry of the channel matrix is acquired
using a vector network analyzer (VNA) to measure the
transfer scattering parameter S
21
, while the other an-
tenna elements are terminated to 50 loads
[11]
. In ad-
dition, in order to remove the effect of path loss, the
channel matrix needs to be normalized. Given that
R T
[ ]
N N
ij
g

= e G C is the measured channel matrix, the
normalization factor f is defined as
2
R T
|| ||
= f
N N
G
(3)
where || || is the Frobenius norm of a matrix.
The average received SNR in Eq. (1) is calculated as
R T
2
T
1 1
R
| |
N N
ij
i j
P g
N v

= =
=

(4)
where P
T
is the power of each transmit antenna ele-
ment, and v is the noise power added at each receive
antenna element
[12]
.
In adaptive MIMO systems, the definition of the
channel capacity is complicated because of the recon-
figurability of the antenna array. Boerman and Bern-
hard
[12]
proposed a new method in which the channel
capacities are calculated at the same level of noise
power v instead of SNR. This method is appropriate
since different configurations of antenna array may
lead to different received signal powers, which means
different average received SNRs. Therefore, the
channel capacity at each configuration is calculated as
follows.
- The measured channel matrix is normalized by its
own normalization factor, as in Eq. (3).
- The average received SNR is computed using Eq.
(4).
- By substituting the above results into Eqs. (1) and
(2), the channel capacity is acquired.
3 Measurements and Results
In order to evaluate the performance of the four-ele-
ment antenna array with selection circuits, a measure-
ment campaign was carried out in an indoor multipath
environment, Room 919 in Main Building at Tsinghua
University. As shown in Fig. 2, the room has a dimen-
sion of 7 m15 m with two sub-rooms separated by an
inner door. There are several tables and partition
boards in the room. The tables are 0.8 m high and the
LI Zhengyi (:j) et al..Performance Evaluation of a Four-Element Antenna Array with Selection

297
partition boards is 1.2 m high. The antenna array was
equipped at the transmitter and a traditional two-ele-
ment antenna array
[13]
was located at the receiver.
In the measurement, the transmitter was fixed at one
position (Tx), while the receiver was placed at five
different locations (Rx1-Rx5) as shown in Fig. 2. The
heights of the transmitter and the receiver were both
set at 1 m, so Tx-Rx1 and Tx-Rx5 (inner door was
open) are line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios while Tx-Rx2,
Tx-Rx3, and Tx-Rx4 are non-line-of-sight (NLOS)
scenarios. At each pair of locations, the transmitter can
change its configuration: the selection of elements. For
brevity, only some typical configurations are presented
here. Up (U) means only elements 1 and 2 are se-
lected; Down (D) means only elements 3 and 4 are
selected; Left (L) means only elements 1 and 3 are
selected; and Right (R) means only elements 2 and 4
are selected. Therefore, a 22 adaptive MIMO system
is set up.

Fig. 2 Plan of Room 919 in Main Building at Tsinghua
University
The complex gains of the channel matrix were
measured sequentially by a VNA (Agilent E5062A).
The measurements were performed over a 300 MHz
bandwidth spaced 1 MHz apart (301 points) and cen-
tered at 2.05 GHz, which covers the UMTS band. The
transmitted power was 10 dBm and the dynamic range
was nearly 120 dB with an intermediate frequency of
100 Hz. During the measurements, there was no
movement in the room (inner door was open and outer
door was shut), so the channel is assumed to be
quasi-stationary. Furthermore, for each pair of loca-
tions and for each configuration, three measurements
were taken in order to verify the stationary and to av-
erage the results.

Fig. 3 Channel capacities against different antenna
array configurations at five pairs of locations with an
assumed noise power of 5 nW
According to the methodology in Section 2, the
channel capacities are calculated with an assumed
noise power of 5 nW, and plotted against different con-
figurations in Fig. 3. Referring to the figure, the capac-
ity in Tx-Rx5 is the highest among the five pairs of
locations. That is because Tx-Rx5 is LOS scenario and
the distance between the transmitter and the receiver is
the shortest. Meanwhile, the results show that different
channel conditions prefer different antenna array con-
figurations. For example, in Tx-Rx2 (NLOS), the
highest capacity is achieved at 3.50 bps/Hz with con-
figuration R, acquiring 16%, 10%, and 32% im-
provements compared to configurations U, D, and
L. In comparison, in Tx-Rx5 (LOS), the highest ca-
pacity is achieved at 9.16 bps/Hz with configuration
D, acquiring 30%, 21%, and 14% improvements
compared to configurations U, L, and R. The
reason is that different antenna array configurations
have different radiation properties. As a result, differ-
ent antenna array configurations can obtain different
average received SNRs and different channel capaci-
ties. The channel capacities at five pairs of locations
with the best configuration are plotted in Fig. 4, la-
beled with Best. As a reference, the channel capaci-
ties with configuration U are also plotted in Fig. 4.
The results show that configuration Best outper-
forms U greatly (16% improvement in Tx-Rx2, 14%
in Tx-Rx3, 25% in Tx-Rx4, and 30% in Tx-Rx5) ex-
cept that in Tx-Rx1 configuration U is the best con-
figuration. Therefore, in varying channel conditions the
antenna array can support antenna selection algorithms
to select the best sub-set of elements to increase chan-
nel capacity.
Tsinghua Science and Technology, June 2010, 15(3): 294-298

298

Fig. 4 Channel capacities (with an assumed noise power
of 5 nW) at five pairs of locations with the best configura-
tion (labeled with Best) and configuration U
4 Conclusions
Antenna selection is an effective method to achieve
reconfigurable antenna arrays for adaptive MIMO sys-
tems. In this paper, the performance of a four-element
antenna array with selection circuits in the UMTS band
is evaluated. With eight pin-diodes embedded in the
feeding network, the antenna array can select any
sub-set of elements from among the four elements.
Then an adaptive MIMO system was set up and a
measurement campaign was taken in an indoor multi-
path environment, including LOS and NLOS scenarios.
The results show that different channel conditions pre-
fer different antenna array configurations. Therefore,
when the channel conditions vary, the antenna array
can support antenna selection algorithms to select the
best sub-set of elements to increase channel capacity.
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