Measurement and Characterization of the Temporal Behavior of Fixed Massive MIMO Links

Stefan Wesemann1, Heinz Schlesinger2, Andreas Pascht3, Oliver Blume1

  • 1Nokia Bell Labs
  • 2Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent
  • 3Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs

Details

12:10 - 14:20 | Thu 16 Mar | Poster Area | P1.10

Session: Poster Session I

Abstract

Measurements of fixed Massive MIMO links at a carrier frequency of 2.6GHz are reported. The temporal fading (due to moving scatterers) at the individual antenna elements is characterized in terms of K-factors and coherence times. We observe approx. 5dB larger K-factors during night-time as well as approx. 10dB higher values for the line-of-sight location. The analysis of the fading's cross-correlation between the different antenna elements shows a stronger correlation in the vertical domain than in the horizontal one. However, a horizontal lambda/2-spacing still provides a significant amount of cross-correlation (i.e., values above 0.5 in 6 out of 10 locations); that is, it provides the worse spatial separation of the measurement locations. The channel hardening effect mitigates the temporal channel gain variations for a 64-antenna link to less than 1dB. The dominant temporal fluctuation of a channel vector is the drift of its subspace, which significantly deteriorates the performance of nullspace-based spatial multiplexing schemes such as zero-forcing.