A MIMO Channel Model for Wireless Personal Area Networks

Recent years have seen an increasing attention given to wireless Personal Area Networks (PANs), which are typically networks with small transmitter-receiver separation. The desire for high data rates has led to an interest in deploying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission for such systems, but up until this date there exists, to the authors' best knowledge, no MIMO channel model that enables performance simulations of such systems. An important characteristic of PANs, and at the same time an important difference to regular wireless local area networks, is the interaction between the antenna array and the user. In conjunction with the irregular antenna arrangements that are typical for PAN devices, this has been shown to lead to flexible channel statistics. In this paper we present a MIMO model for PANs that incorporates these effects by prescribing different small-scale statistics and gains to different antenna elements. The proposed model can thus be seen as a generalization of the classical MIMO model for line-of-sight situations. The model is compared to several sets of measurement data and found to provide a very good description of the essential PAN channel characteristics. We also provide a detailed parameterization of the model for a particular PAN scenario.