Mobile Measurements at 3.7 GHz Using a Massive MIMO Antenna Array in Outdoor Environments

Overview & Synopsis

Massive MIMO technology offers higher capacity, faster throughput and improved spectral and energy efficiency, thanks to the use of large-scale antenna arrays at the base station (BS), which enable beamforming and exploit the multipath richness. In this paper, we experimentally investigate massive MIMO propagation channel in several propagation environments. For this purpose, we have developed a new sounding experimentation using a large-scale planar array with about one thousand elements. Channel measurements were carried out at 3.7 GHz. We used a Virtual Planar Array (VPA) composed by an actual Uniform Linear Array (ULA) with 36 elements on the top of a moving vehicle to exploit its displacement to generate the second dimension of the VPA. A wideband channel sounder was used to record propagation channel transfer functions and to compute wideband characteristics. A new approach to estimate 3D direction of arrival (DoA) using a rectangular planar array is presented.