New intuitive metrics for diversity performance evaluation of multi-element antenna systems

Diversity performance of multi-element antenna (MEA) systems is evaluated using several metrics. The most common are the diversity antenna gain (DAG), the effective diversity gain (EDG) and the actual diversity gain (ADG). These metrics calculate the performance by comparing the MEA system with the reference antenna at a fixed outage probability level, i.e., usually at 1% outage level. As fixed outage levels are just an indication of probability of occurrence of specific signal levels, they provide limited insight into realistic deep-fade cases. Thus, we introduce three novel metrics, namely, the fading mitigation gain (FMG), the reliability percentage (RP) and the generalized diversity antenna gain (GDAG) for characterizing diversity performance when deep fades take place in one or more of the diversity branches. Based on the aforementioned metrics, intuitive knowledge on the diversity performance of MEA systems is provided.