Effect of Antenna Separation on Capacity of BLAST System in Correlated Channels

As the base station is usually placed above local clutter, the angular spectrum incident on the base is narrow, inducing correlation among base antenna signals, which reduces the capacity of a multiple transmit and receive antenna systems. In this work the general expression for link capacity is derived, when there is correlation among receive antennas and among transmit antennas. It is found that an antenna separation of 4 wavelengths between nearest neighbors in a linear base array of dually polarized antennas allows one to achieve 80% of the capacity attainable in the uncorrelated antenna case.