Extending the reverberation chamber using a channel emulator for characterisation of over-the-air performance of multiple-input–multiple-output wireless devices

The reverberation chamber (RC) is a common tool in the wireless industry for evaluating the performance of wireless devices. In its standalone configuration, it provides an accurate and efficient test setup widely accepted for performance evaluation for R&D, acceptance testing purposes and similar. This study describes how a channel emulator can be integrated into the RC setup and in this way extend the inherent channel model of the standalone RC. It is shown that this combined setup provides a flexible solution with high accuracy for emulating various test scenarios, thus enabling comprehensive over-the-air performance evaluation of multiple-input-multiple-output wireless devices. The properties for two examples of test scenarios are described in details. These scenarios are further utilised for obtaining the data throughput performance for commercially available devices, in order to illustrate the value of multi-scenario testing.