MIMO Performance Evaluation in a Street Microcell Using a Spatial Fading Emulator in Comparison with a Radio Propagation Test

This paper presents effectiveness of a RF-controlled spatial fading emulator on MIMO performance evaluation in a street microcell environment in comparison with a radio propagation test. The fading emulator can produce a radio propagation environment with a uniform and non-uniform angular power spectra (APS) in the horizontal plane. In this paper, we measured MIMO characteristics of four handset arrays in a multipath environment with one cluster by the emulator. From this, good agreement between the results obtained by the emulator and experimental data of a radio propagation test in a street microcell reveals the emulator to be effective in evaluating the handset MIMO performance in a multipath environment. The study presented in this paper was conducted under the collaboration between Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and Panasonic Corporation, Japan. The propagation test presented here was performed under the collaboration among Aalborg University, Denmark and Panasonic Corporation and Panasonic Mobile Communications Corporation, Japan.