Efficient experimental evaluation of a MIMO handset with user influence

The immediate environment of handset antennas, including the casings and the users holding the handsets, has a strong impact on the radio channel in mobile communication. In this paper we investigate a composite channel method that synthetically combines double-directional measurements of the user-less propagation channel with measured super-antenna patterns, i.e., patterns of the combined antenna-casing-user arrangement. We experimentally evaluate the method by comparing results (power, capacity, and eigenvalue distribution) obtained from this composite method with direct measurements in the same environment. The measurements were done in two static 8 × 4 MIMO scenarios at 2.6 GHz, with the user indoors and the base station located outdoors and indoors, respectively. A realistic user phantom together with a"smart-phone" handset mock-up with four antenna elements was used, and different configurations and orientations were tested. The method gives statistical distributions of the MIMO eigenvalues, that are close to the measured. By using the composite method, we found that the user, apart from introducing hand and body loss that mainly decreases the SNR of the channel, slightly increases the correlation between the fading at the antenna elements.