On multistreaming with electrically small antenna arrays

We report on our research about the multistreaming capability of electrically small antenna arrays. It is shown that the near-field interaction of the closely spaced antennas accounts for a surprisingly good multistreaming capability. This is demonstrated for a 2 × 2 system of thin half-wavelength dipoles in a multipath environment provided by two reflector plates, and isotropic back-ground noise. Decoupling/power-matching and decoupling/noise-matching networks are applied at the transmit side and the receive side arrays, respectively. In the absence of heat loss in the matching networks and antennas, the simultaneous transfer of two data streams is supported even in the extreme case where the electrical separation of the antennas in the arrays approaches zero.