Effect of Antenna Pattern on the Electromagnetic MIMO Communication

Using ideas from the Fourier plane-wave expansion of a channel model, we establish an electromagnetic (EM) channel model considering the effect of both antenna sides and propagation environment. The coupling effect between antennas becomes more and more serious with the reduction of antenna element spacing. Due to scan impedance mismatch caused by coupling effect, each individual element in an array suffers from the loss of reflection efficiency, which leads to the decrease in channel capacity. With numerical simulation, we show that under this revised model, channel capacity will not increase unboundedly as the number of antenna elements in a fixed-size array increases.