Experimental verification of a ray-launching model used for the prediction of indoor wideband directional radio channel at 5.8 GHz

Space-time communication systems, also known as MIMO systems, make use of temporal and spatial antenna processing techniques to increase capacity and to improve quality-of-services. The processing and combiniug will act locally on these ´closely spaced´ MIMO signals; therefore, a local description of the radio channel is necessary. In this paper, the evaluation of a 3D raylaunching tool for the prediction of local radio channel characteristics is presented. For this purpose, spatial channel measurements have been performed indoor at 5.8 GHz. Furthermore, necessary but unknown material dielectric properties have been determined with transmission and reflection measurements. Both line-ofsight and non-line-of-sight cases with different antenna configurations have been studied. Results show a good correspondence between predicted and measured average received power and rms delay spread. For accurate predictions, however, it is important to carefully choose the ray-launching angle step and include detailed environment features such as metallic furniture.