Versatile Radio Channel Sounder for Double Directional and Multi-link MIMO Channel Measurements at 11 GHz

摘要

This paper presents a 24 x 24 MIMO channel sounder that has been developed based on a scalable fully parallel MINI architecture. It can be flexibly configured with 3 sub-transmitters and 3 sub-receivers, each of which consists of 8 RF ports. This flexibility allows the measurement for both purposes of double directional and multi-link MIMO channel measurements. Implementation issues related to the multi-link operation on the fully parallel architecture were successfully solved by appropriate system design and applying several calibration techniques. The performance of the developed system was validated by extensive test experiments. Finally, a multi-link channel measurement example in an indoor environment was presented demonstrating the capability of the proposed system.