On the Duality Between MIMO Systems With Distributed Antennas and MIMO Systems With Colocated Antennas

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems are known to offer huge advantages over single-antenna systems, both with regard to capacity and error performance. Usually, quite restrictive assumptions are made in the literature on MIMO systems concerning the spacing of the individual antenna elements. On the one hand, it is typically assumed that the antenna elements at transmitter and receiver are co-located, that is, they belong to some sort of antenna array. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the antenna spacings are sufficiently large, so as to justify the assumption of uncorrelated fading on the individual transmission links. From numerous publications it is known that spatially correlated links caused by insufficient antenna spacings lead to a loss in capacity and error performance.