On the impact of correlated fading for MIMO-systems

We investigate the effects of fading correlations on wireless communication systems employing multiple antennas at both the receiving and the transmitting side of the link, so called multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. It turns out that these effects depend on factors such as the amount of transmitter sided channel knowledge and the availability of other sources of diversity than space. For the information theoretic analysis of the latter, the concept of sample-mean outage is introduced, that allows to apply information theoretic measures, like capacity or cutoff-rate to time selective channels. It will be shown, that in contrast to common belief, correlated fading may offer better performance than uncorrelated fading permits.