System-Level Channel Modeling Based on Active Measurements from a Public 3G/UMTS Network

In this contribution, two measurement campaigns are reported which were conducted in urban areas of Shanghai for characterizing the radio channels in an operating Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). The signals on the common pilot channels transmitted by multiple NodeBs (NBs) are used to calculate the channel impulse responses (CIRs). A Space-Alternating Generalized Expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm is applied to extracting the delays, Doppler frequencies and complex attenuations of multiple specular path components from the CIRs. Based on the delay spreads calculated, the channels are categorized into three types, i.e. the single-path, two-path and multi-path. Based on the measurements at more than 1400 locations for 74 NBs, the statistics of system-level channel characteristics, such as the percentage of channels per NB belonging to different categories and the length of the distance within which the same channel category is observed are extracted.