Crucial developments to the recently introduced signal-space approach for multiplexing multiple data symbols using a single-radio switched antenna are presented. First, we introduce a general framework for expressing the spatial multiplexing relation of the transmit signals only from the antenna scattering parameters and the modulating reactive loading. This not only avoids tedious far-field calculations, but more importantly provides an efficient and practical strategy for spatially multiplexing PSK signals of any modulation order. The proposed approach allows ensuring a constant impedance matching at the input of the driving antenna for all symbol combinations, and as importantly uses only passive reconfigurable loads. This obviates the use of reconfigurable matching networks and active loads, respectively, thereby overcoming stringent limitations of previous single-feed MIMO techniques in terms of complexity, efficiency, and power consumption. The proposed approach is illustrated by the design of a realistic very compact antenna system optimized for multiplexing QPSK signals. The results show that the proposed approach can bring the MIMO benefits to the low-end user terminals at a reduced RF complexity.

In this work is presented a discussion on the challenges in 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) smartphone antennas' design, also providing measurement results of the most representative devices. Both Total Radiated Power (TRP) and Total Isotropic Sensitivity (TIS) are measured for different frequency bands, showing that the newest phones tend to underperform when compared with less recent devices. The implications of these results are discussed and possible countermeasures are suggested.

The paper sheds light on the beamforming (BF) performance of large (potentially unconstrained in size) as well as dense (but physically constrained in size) antenna arrays when equipped with arbitrarily many elements. Two operational modes are investigated: Single-layer BF and multi-layer BF. In the first mode, a realistic BF criterion namely the average BF gain is revisited and employed to understand the far-field and the near-field effects on the BF performance of large-scale antennas above a clutter. The diminishing throughput returns in a single-layer BF mode versus the number of antennas necessitate multi-layering. In the multi-layer BF mode, the RF coverage is divided into a number of directive non-overlapping sector-beams in a deterministic manner within a multi-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system. The optimal number of layers that maximizes the user's sum-rate given a constrained antenna array is found as a compromise between the multiplexing gain (associated with the number of sector-beams) and the inter-beam interference, represented by the side lobe level (SLL).

The paper proposes a novel approach for securing the wireless communication by designing the signal in a way that makes its modulation format direction-dependent. The idea is to exploit the multi antennas at the transmitter to superimpose a space-time varying interfering component (at the modulation rate) while staying orthogonal to the desired receiver's direction. Unlike conventional interference or artificial noise injection techniques, the proposed approach impedes an arbitrary eavesdropper from blindly separating the information data symbols from the injected interference due to its space-time varying nature.

Space-time coded cooperative transmission has been proposed as a means to prolong the battery lifetime of conventional single-antenna energy-constrained wireless sensor nodes. However, newly proposed smart-antenna sensor prototypes enable the existence of more than one antenna within a single-radio transceiver architecture. Exploiting such capability, this paper proposes simple non-cooperative space-time techniques for single-RF switched-antenna systems that reduce significantly both the transmission and the circuit energy consumption. The energy savings of the suggested schemes are shown not only against conventional SISO systems, but also against cooperative diversity schemes in Rayleigh and log-normal shadowed Rayleigh fading channels with distance-based path loss.

A novel orthogonal space time block code (OSTBC) that is capable of extracting a diversity order of two via a single RF frontend is proposed in this paper. The scheme is implemented using a practical antenna system of two transmit antennas connected to a common ground. An orthogonal block of two real (non-complex) signals is transmitted over a duration of two symbol periods by exciting one antenna every symbol period while exciting the other parasitically by the field of the active one. A switched-antenna system similar to the one reported in [10] can be used for simultaneously driving and switching the antenna elements. Besides the orthogonality of the signals, the array far-field is a linear mixture of two eigenpatterns onto which the BPSK signals are mapped, hence independent fading among the signals is almost always guaranteed.

The downlink performance of systems exploiting multiuser diversity has been shown to improve by using multiple antenna receivers and diversity combining techniques. However, the cost and power restrictions of the user mobile terminals prohibit the use of multiple antennas whereas the size limitations can result in correlated and coupled receive antenna elements downgrading the effectiveness of the applied schemes. In this paper, we propose a simple beam selection combining (SC) technique using a miniaturized single radio receive antenna system assisted by low cost parasitic antennas. The system is optimized for both antenna efficiency and diversity thus made capable of forming four practically uncorrelated beam-patterns. The computer simulations show that the proposed beam SC technique outperforms classical antenna SC as well as a previously reported beam combining approach in terms of the average throughput especially for small user populations.

A universal scheme for encoding multiple symbol streams using a single driven element (and consequently a single radio frequency (RF) frontend) surrounded by parasitic elements (PE) loaded with variable reactive loads, is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme is based on creating a MIMO system by expanding the far-field of a compact parasitic array into an orthogonal set of angular functions (basis). Independent information streams are encoded by means of angular variations of the far-field in the wavevector domain, rather than spatial variations as usually happens in conventional MIMO systems. The array can spatially multiplex the input streams by creating all the desired linear combinations (for a given modulation scheme) of the basis functions. The desired combinations are obtained by projecting the ratio of the symbols to be spatially multiplexed on the ratio of the basis functions' weights (complex coefficients), which is a function of the currents induced on the PE within the antenna domain, and controlled by the independent reactive loadings.

A framework for implementing spatial multiplexing using an electronically steerable parasitic array radiator (ESPAR) antenna is presented. While traditional multi-element arrays (MEA) show great potential for meeting the increasing demand for higher data rates, they come at the expense of computationally demanding signal processing, larger size, and higher consumption of DC power, making traditional MEA impractical at userspsila hand-held devices. In this work, we introduce a novel methodology for using ESPAR antennas as a compact, cheap and less power-hungry MEA, for spatially multiplexing BPSK symbols, while still providing comparable spectral efficiency and performance as traditional MEA. The main idea is to exploit the strong mutual coupling among the ESPAR antenna elements at the transmitter side to create a linear combination of orthogonal patterns (beams), onto which the symbols are directly mapped, instead of the traditional approach of sending the symbols toward different locations within the antenna domain. On the other side, the receiver (base-station (BS) or access point (AP)) is equipped with a traditional uniform linear array (ULA), and decodes the received signal using the Vertical Bell labs layered space time (VBLAST) algorithm.