Realization of 4-by-4 MIMO channel using one composite leaky coaxial cable

Leaky coaxial cable (LCX) is widely used for wireless communication systems as an antenna for a linear-cell, which covers long and shallow areas. Since one LCX is usually utilized as one antenna, more than one LCX is required to configure a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system. It means it is costly and space-consuming. To resolve these problems, we proposed a novel MIMO method for LCX. In this paper, we propose the method to utilize one composite cable, which consists of a pair of LCXs with different radiation characteristics, to configure a 4 × 4 MIMO channel. The measurement results confirmed that the proposed composite cable can realize a good channel condition for 4 × 4 MIMO transmission even if it is put in an anechoic chamber where no reflection path exists. On the other hand, the results also confirmed that it has good channel condition even if the spacing between a pair of LCX is as small as 2cm for the 5GHz band. Therefore the proposed system can reduce the space requirement for MIMO deployment for wireless application over linear-cell environments to cope with the high rapid increase of consumer electronics devices.