Leveraging Depolarization to Increase the Link Reliability for Wireless Sensors Operating in Hyper-Rayleigh Environments

Wireless communications within enclosed environments such as aircraft and vehicles have been shown to experience fading with statistics that are worse than Rayleigh. Motivated by low-cost, low-complexity systems (e.g., wireless sensors) that may be deployed in such environments, this work explores the benefits of polarization diversity using very large data sets collected over a small area and over the 5-6 GHz band. The results also demonstrate that antennas capable of capturing depolarized signal components can significantly mitigate the harshest of fading environments.