Spatial correlation

Theoretically, the performance of wireless communication systems can be improved by having multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver. The idea is that if the propagation channels between each pair of transmit and receive antennas are statistically independent and identically distributed, then multiple independent channels with identical characteristics can be created by precoding and be used for either transmitting multiple data streams or increasing the reliability (in terms of bit error rate). In practice, the channels between different antennas are often correlated and therefore the potential multi antenna gains may not always be obtainable. This is called spatial correlation as it can be interpreted as a correlation between a signal's spatial direction and the average received signal gain.