On Multistreaming With Compact Antennas Arrays

The authors investigate the capability of compact antenna arrays to support the simultaneous transfer of several independent data streams over the same band of frequencies. It is shown that the near-field interaction of the closely spaced antennas inside the arrays accounts for a surprisingly good multistreaming capability, even for extremely compact arrays. This result is demonstrated for the case of a 2 × 2 system of thin half-wavelength dipoles in a multipath environment provided by two perfectly conducting reflector plates, and isotropic background noise. Decoupling/power-matching and decoupling/noise-matching networks are applied at the transmit side and the receive side arrays, respectively.