Massive MIMO channel measurements and analysis at 3.33 GHz

As an important candidate technologies of 5th generation mobile communication system (5G), massive MIMO is able to make full use of space resources, and effectively improves the spectrum efficiency, thus helps to solve the current condition of the shortage of spectrum resources. In order to study the massive MIMO technology, the radio channel characteristics, which is different to the conventional MIMO systems, must be captured. Therefore, in this paper, a measurement campaign at the 3.33 GHz frequency band is carried out in an outdoor scenario using a large virtual antenna array with 64 elements. Based on the measured data, we analyze the behaviors of the typical channel parameters including power delay profile (PDP), power azimuth-delay spectrum (PADS), power delay spectrum (PDS), power azimuth spectrum (PAS), delay spread (DS) and azimuth spread (AS). The results show that the non-stationary of the channel over the large array size occur both in delay and spatial domains. The results is useful to develop the massive MIMO channel model and design the 5G communication system.