Variation of Estimated Large-Scale MIMO Channel Properties between Repeated Measurements

The joint characterization of the multiple links becomes important for mesh topologies, relaying, distributed antennas, cooperative transmission, virtual MIMO etc. For that purpose simultaneous measurements are needed. Since a suited measurement setup requires multiple channel sounders, a very few of such campaigns have been conducted. A single-sounder approach can be considered as an attractive, less expensive alternative as long as environment stationarity can be insured between consecutive measurement runs. This contribution investigates the variability of large-scale parameters, such as delay and directional spreads, derived from measurements at 2.53 GHz in an outdoor macro-cell scenario. A mobile receiver has been moved twice over the same track whereas the transmitter has been fixed. The large-scale parameters are estimated as averages within local stationarity regions corresponding to areas with a constant multi-path structure. The observed differences between two large-scale parameter sets are used to evaluate stationarity of the outdoor environment between repeated measurements. The reasonably low decorrelation levels have indicated that large-scale characterization of multi-link configuration can be performed sequentially with single sounding device.