On Dynamic Channel Emulation in Sector MPAC for Over-the-Air Testing of Beamformed Massive MIMO Devices

In this article,novel emulation strategies for the sectored multiple probe anechoic chamber(SMPAC)are proposed to enable the reliable evaluation of the massive multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO)device operating at beamforming mode,which requires a realistic non-stationary channel environment.For the dynamic propagation emulation,an efficient closed-form probe weighting strategy minimizing the power angular spectrum(PAS)emulation errors is derived,substantially reducing the associated computational complexity.On the other hand,a novel probe selection algorithm is proposed to reproduce a more accurate fading environment.Various standard channel models and setup configurations are comprehensively simulated to validate the capacity of the proposed methods.The simulation results show that more competent active probes are selected with the proposed method compared to the conventional algorithms.Furthermore,the derived closedform probe weighting strategy offers identical accuracy to that obtained with complicated numerical optimization.Moreover,a realistic dynamic channel measured in an indoor environment is reconstructed with the developed methodologies,and 95.6%PAS similarity can be achieved with 6 active probes.The satisfactory results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are suitable for arbitrary channel emulation.

Emulation of Realistic Multi-Path Propagation Channels inside an Anechoic Chamber for Antenna Diversity Measurements

As antennas are inherently included recommended in Over-The-Air (OTA) testing, it is important to also consider realistic channel models for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) device performance evaluation. This paper aims to emulate realistic multi-Path propagation channels in terms of angles of arrivals (AoA) and cross-polarization ratio (XPR) with Rayleigh fading, inside an anechoic chamber, for antenna diversity measurements. In this purpose, a practical multi-probe anechoic chamber measurement system (MPAC) with 24 probe antennas (SATIMO SG24) has been used. However, the actual configuration of this system is not able to reproduce realistic channels. Therefore, a new method based on the control of the SG24 probes has been developed. At first time, this method has been validated numerically through the comparison of simulated and analytical AoA probability density distributions. At the second time, the performance of an antenna diversity system inside the SG24 has been performed in terms of the correlation coefficient and diversity gain (DG) using an antenna reference system. Simulated and measurements results have shown a good agreement.

Real-time ray-based channel generation and emulation for UAV communications

A real-time ray-based hardware emulator for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) communication channels which suits for the Three-Dimensional(3D) dynamic scenarios and considers the movements of both terminals is developed in this paper. The time-variant channel parameters, i.e.,ray delay, ray gain, and ray Doppler frequency are precalculated in the host by using the Ray Tracing(RT) method. Meanwhile, RT simulation dramatically increases the number of valid rays. To address the problem of resource limitation and huge computational burden in the implementation,an efficient ray coefficients generation method based on iteration is proposed and implemented.With the advantages of low cost and high flexibility, a Software Defined Radio(SDR) hardware platform is used to emulate the ray-based UAV channels by utilizing the compact architecture including the Time-Division(TD) scheme and Tapped-Delay Line(TDL) for channel convolution.Finally, hardware measurement results demonstrate that the properties of emulated channel, i.e.,Power Delay Profile(PDP) and Doppler Power Spectrum Density(DPSD) consist with the simulated ones, which verifies the correctness of hardware implementation. The proposed channel emulator provides an efficient way for optimization, verification, and evaluation of UAV communication systems.

Over-the-air measurement for MIMO systems

Over-the-air(OTA)testing is an industry standard practice for evaluating transceiver performance in wireless devices.For the fifth generation(5G)and beyond wireless systems with high integration,OTA testing is probably the only reliable method to accurately measure the transceiver performance,suitable for certification as well as for providing feedback for design verification and optimization.Further,multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO)technology is extensively applied for stable connection,high throughput rate,and low latency.In this paper,we provide an overview of the three main methods for evaluating the MIMO OTA performance,namely,the multiprobe anechoic chamber(MPAC)method,the reverberation chamber plus channel emulator(RC+CE)method,and the radiated two-stage(RTS)method,with the aim of providing a useful guideline for developing effective wireless performance testing in future 5G-and-beyond wireless systems.