IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

1, 2002 157

Effect of Element Mutual Coupling on the Capacity

of Fixed Length Linear Arrays
Ramakrishna Janaswamy, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractThe effect of element mutual coupling on the and are taken to be small compared to the distance between
capacity of multiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) antenna the transmitter and receiver so that the mean path loss between
systems is demonstrated by considering a fixed-length linear any pair , where , is
array of half-wave dipoles. Mutual coupling between elements,
which influences both the spatial correlation and the received roughly the same and equal to . We assume propagation to
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), is taken into account by means of take place in the azimuth plane and orient the dipoles with their
the impedance matrix. Monte Carlo simulations are performed axes along the vertical ( -) axis.
for both single-sided (i.e., transmitting end or receiving end) and In the presence of mutual coupling, the transmitting an-
double-sided fading correlations. It is shown that mutual coupling tenna can be regarded as a coupled port network with
results in substantially lower capacity and, hence, in reduced
degrees of freedom. terminals. If , where the superscript
stands for transpose, is the vector of terminal currents and
Index TermsCapacity, correlation, mutual coupling, multiple- is the vector of terminal voltages at the
inputmultiple-output (MIMO).
transmitting end, then circuit relations at the -ports of the
network result in
I. INTRODUCTION
(1)

M ULTIPLE-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) systems are

very attractive for boosting capacity of a wireless com-
munication link in a rich multipath environment [6]. Foschini
where is the impedance matrix at the transmitting end. The
th element of the impedance matric is simply equal to
and Gans [6] have shown that the information theoretic capacity when all of the other ports are open circuited. We will ig-
increases linearly asymptotically with the number of elements nore the edge effects so that between the elements and
of an MIMO system. The high capacity offered by the for a given spacing is independent of the array length. This
MIMO system is reduced if the various signals at the receiver are is also known as the infinite array approximation for finite ar-
correlated. (It may be noted that even low correlation does not rays. Such an assumption is made here merely for analytical
necessarily guarantee high capacity, particularly when the envi- simplicity so that closed form expressions can be used to com-
ronment possesses keyholes [3]). Correlation at the receiver pute the impedance matrix elements. It is always possible to em-
can arise from: 1) nonrichness of the scattering environment, for ploy numerical techniques such as the method of moments [8]
example, ones with low angular spreads and 2) mutual coupling to more accurately calculate the impedance matrix elements of
between the transmit and/or receive antenna elements. Several a finite array. Previous studies have indicated that the infinite
authors [4], [5], [12], [] have investigated the effect of high cor- array approximation for the computation of mutual coupling is
relation arising from nonrichness of the scattering environment reasonable if the number of elements exceeds five [1].
on the capacity of MIMO systems. In [], the authors considered Relating the terminal voltage to the source voltage via
fixed length linear arrays at both ends and derived analytical re- the source impedance : ,
sults for the asymptotic capacity of an MIMO system. results in
Preliminary work on the effect of antenna mutual coupling is re-
ported in [13]. In this letter, we extend the work of [] and show, (2)
by means of Monte Carlo simulations, the effect of antenna mu- where and is the diagonal matrix
tual coupling on the capacity of an MIMO system with consisting of the source impedances. We choose the source
fixed. impedance such that , where the superscript de-
notes complex conjugation. This choice will roughly correspond
II. THEORY to a conjugate match in the presence of mild coupling, but a true
Fig. 1 shows an MIMO system. The elements at each conjugate match in the presence of strong coupling will require
end are assumed to be identical dipoles. The aperture lengths impedances at each port [11]. If the transmitting elements are
uncoupled, then is diagonal with entries . Consequently,
is also diagonal with entries
Manuscript received September 5, 2002; revised October 31, 2002. This work
was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant ECS-9979282.
. In the subsequent analysis we
R. Janaswamy is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engi- modify (2) to
neering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-9292 USA (e-mail:
janaswamy@ecs.umass.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2002.807570
(3)

1536-1225/02$17.00 2002 IEEE

158 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 1, 2002

Fig. 1. An (M; N ) MIMO system with mutual coupling.

At the receiving end, a similar analysis will yield [7], [10]

(5)

where is the voltage vector across

the output of the receive array, is the
vector of open circuited voltages induced across the receive
array, and .
Once again approximate conjugate match is assumed so that
is a diagonal matrix with entries , . The
received signal is related to the radiated signal through the
channel relation

(6)

where, for Rayleigh fading, is an complex Gaussian

Fig. 2. Mean capacity of MIMO system with mutual coupling at the receiving matrix with correlated entries. The quantity represents the
end. narrow beam channel transfer function between the th trans-
mitting element and the th receiving element and will be a
so that we get in the case of zero mutual coupling. random number. The correlation in the entries of is due to
The input signal vector is assumed to be random with un- the nonrichness of the scattering environment and/or noninfinite
correlated entries. If denotes expectation over the symbol separation between elements. (It may be mentioned parentheti-
time , then the average input power to the transmit array, as- cally that by a rich scattering environment we mean an environ-
suming that the signals appear across a one-ohm resistor, is ment where the spatial correlation function is a delta function.
, where the superscript Such a correlation function represents an ideal case and will not
stands for Hermitian conjugate. This is the total power sup- exist even when the waves arrive uniformly in all space). As in
plied to the transmit array. However, because of mutual coupling our previous work [], we will assume that
and impedance mismatch, the radiated power will be different
from it. The total radiated power , assuming once again that (7)
the signals appear across a 1- resistor, is
where angle brackets denote expectation over the channel co-
herence time and and are spatial correlation matrices
(4)
at the transmitting and receiving ends. is the Bessel func-
tion of the first kind of order zero. Other correlations can be
where we have made use of (3) and the fact that handled in a like manner. Note that the spatial correlation exists
, being an identity matrix of order . even in the absence of element mutual coupling. Combining all
JANASWAMY: ELEMENT MUTUAL COUPLING ON THE CAPACITY OF FIXED LENGTH LINEAR ARRAYS 159

lower than that without it [10, p. 207] due to the change in the
azimuth plane pattern of the dipoles. The present analysis also
includes this in the formulation and slight improvement in the
results in the presence of mutual coupling will be shown below
for some range of element numbers.
The total instantaneous (relative to the channel coherence
time, which is usually ) power received in all of the elements
is . If is the
mean noise power per antenna, the mean signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR) per receiving antenna element can be shown to be

(10)

From the above expression it is easy to see that the mean SNR
per element in the absence of mutual coupling ( and
Fig. 3. Radiated power and mean SNR with variable size receiving array. Left
vertical axis is for  and the right vertical axis is for P . are identity matrices) is equal to .
The information theoretic capacity in bits/s/Hz of the
MIMO system subject to constant input power is [14]

(11)

where is an uncorrelated complex Gaussian process with

zero mean and unit variance.

III. NUMERICAL SIMULATION RESULTS

We use (11) to compute the instantaneous capacity for a
given realization of . Analytical expressions for the mutual
impedance of dipole elements in a side-by-side configuration
[2] are used to fill and for a given dipole length
Fig. 4. Mean capacity of MIMO system with mutual coupling and equal
and inter element spacing . As stated previously, we take
lenghts at the two ends. the elements of the spatial correlation matrices of the form
, where . In the Monte Carlo
of the above we can express the output signal at the receiver in simulation results average over realizations is
terms of the input signal at the transmitter as performed. The average radiated power is computed from (4)
and the mean SNR from (10). In the following, we take
and without loss of generality.
(8)
Fig. 2 shows the mean capacity for , ,
, and variable . The inter element spacing at
where the composite matrix takes into account the mutual the transmitting end is fixed at so that mutual coupling
coupling at both ends. Using the fading model (7) and (8), the can be ignored at the transmitting end. This can be clearly seen
spatial correlation between the signals and received by examining Fig. 3, which shows . Fig. 3 also
at the th and th elements can be shown to be shows that the received SNR drops beyond almost
algebraically. The capacity can increase when either the spatial
(9) correlation drops or when the received SNR increases. When
the receiving interelement spacing becomes less than roughly
where summation over repeated indexes is implied within. In the , mutual coupling causes the received SNR to drop even
absence of mutual coupling one simply gets . Several though the spatial correlation may decrease. Consequently, the
past studies have shown that the spatial correlation for a pair of capacity actually falls with increasing . Note, however, that a
half-wave dipoles in the presence of mutual coupling is actually slightly increased capacity can result from mutual coupling (for
160 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 1, 2002

pacity once again drops relative to the no mutual coupling case.

A lower bound for uncorrelated case [6] is also shown. It is clear
from Fig. 4 that it is futile to increase beyond roughly 30
and that the capacity actually drops with increasing . Thus
the effective degrees of freedom of such a linear array bound by
mutual coupling is limited to 30. It may be remarked that the
capacity in the presence of mutual coupling can be optimized
by maintaining the radiated power, rather than the input power
fixed [15]. Fig. 6 shows the results with and mean
capacity per dimension. Other array configurations such as cir-
cular arrays and conformal arrays can also be studied using the
formulation given here.

Fig. 5. Radiated power and mean SNR with variable size transmitting and
receiving arrays. Left vertical axis is for  and the right vertical axis is for
P.
Fig. 6. Mean capacity per dimension of MIMO system with mutual coupling
and unequal aperture lengths at the two ends.
in Fig. 2) as a result of lower spatial correlation, while
the mean SNR remains constant. Beyond the capacity
with mutual coupling is less than that without it as the effect of
decreased SNR takes over. Thus, there is no gain in increasing
the number of elements at the receiver beyond . [16] S. Wei, D. Goeckel, and R. Janaswamy, On the capacity of fixed length
Figs. 4 and 5 show the results for variable with . 2002 Conf. Information Sciences and Systems, Mar. 2022, 2002, pp.
In this case, both and fall beyond and the ca-
REFERENCES
[1] N. Amitay, V. Galindo, and C. P. Wu, Theory and Analysis of Phased
Array Antennas. New York: Wiley, 1972.
[2] C. A. Balanis, Antenna Theory: Analysis & Design. New York: Wiley,
1997.
[3] D. Chizhik, G. J. Foschini, M. J. Gans, and R. A. Valenzuela, Key-
holes, correlations, and capacities of multielement transmit and receive
antennas, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 1, pp. 361368, Apr.
2002.
[4] D. Chizhik, F. Rashid-Farrokhi, J. Ling, and A. Lozano, Effect of an-
tenna separation on the capacity of BLAST in correlated channels,
IEEE Commun. Lett., vol. 4, pp. 337339, Nov. 2000.
[5] C. N. Chuah, D. Tse, J. M. Kahn, and R. A. Valenzuela, Capacity
scaling in MIMO wireless systems under correlated fading, IEEE
Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 48, pp. 637651, Mar. 2002.
[6] G. J. Foschini and M. J. Gans, On limits of wireless communications in
a fading environment when using multiple antennas, Wireless Personal
Communications, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 311335, March 1998.
[7] I. J. Gupta and A. K. Ksienski, Effect of mutual coupling on the perfor-
mance of adaptive arrays, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. AP-31,
pp. 785791, Sept. 1983.
[8] R. F. Harrington, Field Computation by Moment Methods. Malabar,
FL: Krieger, 1983.
[9] W. C. Jakes, Ed., Mirowave Mobile Communications. Piscataway, NJ:
IEEE Press, 1994.
[10] R. Janaswamy, Radiowave Propagation & Smart Antennas for Wireless
Communications. Boston, MA: Kluwer, 2000.
[11] W. C. Y. Lee, Effect of mutual coupling on a mobile-radio maximal
ratio combiner with a large number of branches, IEEE Trans. Commun.,
vol. COM-20, pp. 11881193, Dec. 1972.
[12] D. S. Shui, G. J. Foschini, M. J. Gans, and J. M. Kahn, Fading corre-
lation and its effect on the capacity of multielement antenna systems,
IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 48, pp. 502513, Mar. 2000.
[13] T. Svantesson and A. Ranheim, Mutual coupling effects on the capacity
of multiple antenna systems, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoustic, Speech,
and Signal Processing (ICASSP)01, vol. 4, Salt Lake City, UT, May
2001, pp. 24852488.
[14] I. E. Telatar, Capacity of multi-antenna Gaussian channels, Eur. Trans.
Telecom., vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 586595, 1999.
[15] J. W. Wallace and M. A. Jensen, Mutual coupling in MIMO wireless
systems: A rigorous network theory analysis, IEEE J. Select. Areas
Commun., to be published.
linear antenna arrays under bandlimited correlated fading, in Proc.
10881093.