With the fast adoption of LTE and IEEE802.11N,in order to increase themaximum data rate of asystem andto make the communication link more reliable most of thedevices areemploying multiple antennas.Traditionally,fixed antennas are used in such devices.Nowadays,reconfigurable antenna are designed for the purpose offurther increase the performance,which maintain or exceeds the performance of fixed antenna,and by changing their radiation characteristics can adopt to changing wireless channel.This thesisis about studythe possibility of increasein performance by the use ofpattern reconfigurable antennas as receivers.Firstly the performance potentialwas estimated usingsimulations,and thenrepresentedusing two ESPAR versespair of monopole antennas on BER(bit error rate)testbed.This thesismainlyfocused on study aboutpotential performance gains with pattern reconfigurable antennas in themulti-antenna system,and representedin real-world measurements,favorableperformance increases overequivalent systemwith an Omni-directional antenna.For an effective demonstration,two ESPAR antennas were designed,fabricated and evaluated on a hardware BER testbed,and both the captured BER curves as well as the computed channel capacity indicated the superiority of the ESPAR antennas over a pair of monopoles in a multipath-richindoor environment.
　　Reconfigurable antennas have been a common area of research for MIMO related applications,and pattern reconfigurable antennas have received considerable attention.Even thoughchannel measurements had shown capacityimprovements with novel pattern reconfigurable antennas in many cases whilelittle work has been done in this field to studythe performance impactin MIMOand the relationship between power and diversitygain,andtheir effects to increasethe data throughput.This thesis investigated these issues and presented a novalanalysis through both simulated and experimentallymeasured results.