Impact of receive amplifier signal coupling on MIMO system performance

This paper uses a detailed model of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems to explore the impact of signal coupling in the receiver front end on communication capacity. The model is applied to assess the performance of a MIMO system with two transmit and receive antennas in a simulated multipath environment for different amplifier coupling levels. The results show that in practical scenarios where simple impedance matching techniques are used, the circuit coupling can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver and therefore degrade the achievable MIMO capacity.