A MIMO system equipped with multifunctional reconfigurable antennas

A MIMO system equipped with a new class of antenna arrays, henceforth referred to as multifunction reconfigurable antenna arrays (MRAAs), is investigated. The elements of MRAA, i.e. MRAs presented in this work are capable of dynamically changing the sense of polarization of the radiated field thereby providing two reconfigurable modes of operation, i.e. polarization diversity and space diversity. The transmission signaling scheme can also be switched between transmit diversity (TD) and spatial multiplexing (SM). The results show that the reconfigurable modes of operation of an MRAA used in conjunction with adaptive space-time modulation techniques provide additional degree of freedoms to the current adaptive MIMO systems, thereby resulting in more robust system in terms of quality, capacity and reliability. A substantial performance gain is achievable with the proposed system over conventional fixed antenna MIMO systems depending on the channel conditions