A propagation experiment on an actual channel is conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the 1-tap time domain beamforming (TDBF) technique we proposed in previous work. This technique offers simple beamforming for the millimeter waveband massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) applied wireless backhaul and so supports the rapid deployment of fifth generation mobile communications (5G) small cells. This paper details propagation experiments in the 75GHz band and the characteristics evaluations of 1-tap TDBF as determined from actual channel measurements. The results show that 1-tap TDBF array gain nearly equals the frequency domain maximal ratio combining (MRC) value, which is ideal processing; the difference is within 0.5dB. In addition, 1-tap TDBF can improve on the signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR) by about 13% when space division multiplexing (SDM) is performed assuming existing levels of channel estimation error.

This paper experimentally verifies the potential of higher order space division multiplexing in line-of-sight (LOS) channels for multiuser massive MIMO. We previously proposed an inter-user interference (IUI) cancellation scheme and a simplified user scheduling method for Massive Antenna Systems for Wireless Entrance (MAS-WE). In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, channel state information (CSI) for a 1×32 SIMO channel is measured in a real propagation environment with simplified test equipment. Evaluations of the measured CSI data confirm the effectiveness of our proposals; they offer good equal gain transmission (EGT) performance, reduced spatial correlation with enlarged angular gap between users, and quite small channel state fluctuation. Link level simulations elucidate that the simple IUI cancellation method is stable in practical conditions. The degradation in symbol error rate with the measured CSI, relative to that yielded by the output of the theoretical LOS channel model, is insignificant.

This paper presents an experimental study of on-body ultra-wideband (UWB) radio propagation channels within an enclosed space. To facilitate high-speed wireless body area networks, UWB is a promising technology because of its low power consumption and anti-multipath capabilities. The motivation of this study is to examine the effects of nearby humans on the UWB channels by varying the population within an elevator cabin from one (subject alone) to 20 (full capacity of the elevator). The first domain (0 < delay, t ≤ 4ns) in the measured delay profiles was either a direct (for line-of-sight) or diffracted (for non-line-of-sight) wave, which was found almost unrelated to the population; whereas the second domain (t > 4ns) highly depended on it. Total received power and delay spreads decreased with increasing the population. In addition, by varying human population, average power delay profiles were modeled based on measurements.

This letter proposes an Ultra WideBand (UWB) channel gain estimation algorithm that is based on frequency response correlation. From data measured in indoor and outdoor environments, the frequency correlation statistics of the UWB channel are characterized by correlation coefficients, which are represented as functions of the frequency separation according to the propagation environments. We use empirically established correlation coefficient models to develop the proposed channel gain estimation algorithm. In this algorithm, unknown channel gains of intermediate frequencies are estimated from known channel gains of neighboring reference frequencies. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated against various configurations of reference frequencies and compared with that of a conventional estimation algorithm using a linear interpolation scheme.

This paper illustrates a large-scale MIMO propagation channel measurement in a real life environment and evaluates throughput performance of various MIMO schemes in that environment. For that purpose, 44 MIMO transceivers and a novel spatial scanner are fabricated for wideband MIMO channel measurements in the 5 GHz band. A total of more than 50,000 spatial samples in an area of 150 m2, which includes a bedroom, a Japanese room, a hallway, and the living and dining areas, are taken in a real residential home environment. Statistical properties of the propagation channel and throughput performance of various MIMO schemes are evaluated by using measured data. Propagation measurement results show large dynamic channel variations occurring in a real environment in which statistical properties of the channel, such as frequency correlation and spatial correlation are not stationary any more, and become functions of the SNR. Furthermore, evaluation of throughput shows that although MIMO schemes outperform the SISO system in most areas, open loop systems perform badly in the far areas with low SNR. Paying for the cost of CSI or partial CSI at Tx, closed loop and hybrid systems have superior performance compared to other schemes, especially in reasonable SNR areas ranging from 10 dB to 30 dB. Spatial correlation, which is common in Japanese wooden residences, is also found to be a dominant factor causing throughput degradation of the open loop MIMO schemes.

This paper proposes an ultra-wideband double-directional spatio-temporal channel sounding technique using transformation between frequency- and time-domain (FD and TD) signals. Virtual antenna arrays, composed of omnidirectional antennas and scanners, are used for transmission and reception in the FD. After Fourier transforming the received FD signals to TD ones, time of arrival (TOA) is estimated using a peak search over the TD signals, and then angle of arrivals (AOA) and angle of departure (AOD) are estimated using a weighted angle histogram with a multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm applied to the FD signals, inverse-Fourier transformed from the TD signals divided into subregions. Indoor channel sounding results validated that an appropriate weighting reduced a spurious level in the angle histogram by a factor of 0.1 to 0.2 in comparison with that of non-weighting. The proposed technique successfully resolved dominant multipath components, including a direct path, a single reflection, and a single diffraction, in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS environments. Joint TOA and AOA/AOD spectra were also derived from the sounding signals. The spectra illustrated the dominant multipath components (agreed with the prediction by ray tracing) as clusters.

The MIMO system can meet the growing demand for higher capacity in wireless communication fields. So far, the authors have reported that, based on channel measurements, uncoded performance of narrowband MIMO spatial multiplexing in indoor line-of-sight (LOS) environments generally outperforms that in non-LOS (NLOS) ones under the same transmit power condition. In space-frequency coded MIMO-OFDM spatial multiplexing, however, we cannot expect high space-frequency diversity gain in LOS environments because of high fading correlations and low frequency selectivity of channels so that the performance may degrade unlike uncoded cases. In this letter, we present the practical performance of coded MIMO-OFDM spatial multiplexing based on indoor channel measurements. The results show that an LOS environment tends to provide lower space-frequency diversity effect whereas the MIMO-OFDM spatial multiplexing performance is still better in the environment compared with an NLOS environment.

This paper presents an ultra wideband (UWB) channel sounding scheme with a technique for estimating time of arrival (TOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) using measurement signals. Since the power spectrum over the UWB bandwidth can be measured in advance, we propose a signal model using the measurement power spectrum to design the proper UWB signals model. This signal model is more similar to measurement signals than the flat spectrum model which is an ideal model. If more than three waves impinge on a receiver, we must determine the proper grouping of the elements of TOA vector and AOA vector. It is difficult to determine the grouping using only measurement signals because of many degradation factors. We also propose pairing the elements of TOA vector and that of AOA vector using correlation method based on measurement signals and the proposed signal model. This technique is available for more than the case of three paths if pairing the estimated TOAs and AOAs of measurement signals is not accurately determined. We evaluated the proposed techniques for a vector network analyzer (VNA) with a three-dimensional virtual antenna array.

A multiple-input multiple-output software defined radio (MIMO-SDR) platform was developed for implementation of MIMO transmission and propagation measurement systems. This platform consists of multiple functional boards for baseband (BB) digital signal processing and frequency conversion of 5 GHz-band radio frequency (RF) signals. The BB boards have capability of arbitrary system implementation by rewriting software on reconfigurable devices such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and digital signal processors (DSPs). The MIMO-SDR platform employs hybrid implementation architecture by taking advantages of FPGA, DSP, and CPU, where functional blocks with the needs for real-time processing are implemented on the FPGAs/DSPs, and other blocks are processed off-line on the CPU. In order to realize the hybrid implementation, driver software was developed as an application program interface (API) of the MIMO-SDR platform. In this paper, hardware architecture of the developed MIMO-SDR platform and its software implementation architecture are explained. As an application example, implementation of a real-time MIMO channel measurement system and initial measurement results are presented.

We have proposed two space division multiple access (SDMA) approaches for OFDM signals: "Virtual Subcarrier Assignment (VISA)" and "Preamble Subcarrier Assignment (PASA)," both of which can enhance the system capacity without significant change of transmitter/receiver structures for already-existing OFDM-based standards such as IEEE802.11a. In order to investigate the performance of the proposed approaches in real wireless scenarios, we conducted a measurement campaign to obtain real channel state data at 5-GHz band in an indoor environment. Using the measured channel data, we can make the performance evaluation realistic. In this paper, after the brief overview of the two proposed SDMA approaches, we describe our measurement campaign in detail. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of VISA-based system and PASA-based system by computer simulations using the measured channel state data and present a comparative study on the performance of the two proposed SDMA approaches in the realistic wireless environment.