Empirical eigenanalysis of indoor UWB propagation channels

The paper aims at characterizing the second order statistics of indoor ultra-wideband (UWB) channels using channel sounding techniques. We present measurement results for different scenarios conducted in a laboratory setting at Institut Eurecom. These are based on a eigendecomposition of the channel autocovariance matrix, which allows for determining the growth in the number of significant degrees of freedom of the channel process as a function of the signaling bandwidth as well as the statistical correlation between different propagation paths. We show empirical eigenvalue distributions as a function of the signal bandwidth for both line-of-sight and non line-of-sight situations. Furthermore, we give examples where paths from different propagation clusters (possibly arising from reflection or diffraction) show strong statistical dependence.