Information Theoretic Analysis of a Dual-Band MIMO Cellphone Antenna with ANSYS HFSS SBR+

TL;DR

This paper combines electromagnetic simulation and information theory to evaluate a dual-band MIMO cellphone antenna, providing insights into diversity and multiplexing gains with a novel analysis approach.

Contribution

It introduces an information-theoretic analysis method applied to electromagnetic simulation data for MIMO antenna design evaluation.

Findings

The approach accurately estimates outage probability curves.

It reveals differences between traditional correlation-based and information-theoretic measures.

The method assesses diversity and multiplexing gains effectively.

Abstract

Historically, the design of antenna arrays has evolved separately from Shannon theory. Shannon theory adopts a probabilistic approach in the design of communication systems, while antenna design approaches have relied on the deterministic Maxwell theory alone. In this paper, we investigate an information-theoretic analysis approach which we apply to evaluate the design of a dual-band, dual-polarized multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array on a cellphone. To this end, we use ANSYS HFSS, a commercial electromagnetic (EM) simulation software suitable for the numerical optimization of antenna systems. HFSS is used to obtain an accurate model of the cellphone MIMO antenna array and HFSS SBR+ is utilized to obtain channel matrices for a large number of users. Taking advantage of linear and optimal processing at the cellphone, we estimate the outage probability curves. The curves are then used to determine the diversity gain in a moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and the multiplexing gain at a high SNR regime. This approach is then compared with the method of estimating the diversity gain from the envelope correlation coefficients or the beam-coupling matrix showing substantial differences in the two methodologies.