ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Fading Correlation of Co-located Transmitters

Fading or attenuation of a signal due to environment is a phenomenon often en-countered in wireless communications. It is expected that co-located transmitters i.e. transmitters placed very close to each other show a high signal fading correlation due to the presence of similar fading environment. In this thesis, we present an experimental study of this phenomenon. Correlation of received signal strengths obtained from co-located transmitters in dynamically vary-ing environments indicate that the large scale signal variations (shadow fading) are highly correlated while the small scale variations (multipath or fast fading) show a low correlation. Highly correlated large scale variations suggest a presence of same large shadowing elements in the transmit-receive path while a low correlation among the multipath variations is due to mutual coupling between the antennas at very close dis-tances. This has two implications: it suggests that shadow fading variations can serve as an indicator of the co-location of closely spaced transmitters while the multipath variations cannot. However, low multipath signal correlations suggest that antenna diversity could be investigated for implementation in mobile handsets