LTE-Advanced and Next Generation Wireless Networks: Channel Modelling and Propagation

Chapter 15

MIMO Over-the-Air Testing

Andrés Alayón Glazunov¹, Veli-Matti Kolmonen² and Tommi Laitinen²

¹ KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

² Aalto University, Finland

15.1 Introduction

A marked trend in the wireless communication industry is to increase the bandwidths of services offered to customers. For this to become reality, highly optimized and complex systems have been developed. It has been predicted that in new-coming systems, such as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A), the connections Over The Air (OTA), that is, over the wireless link, will reach above 100 Mbit/s in data throughput. These requirements combined with the increasingly complex usage environments pose challenging system design problems. For example, today's tough requirements on high speed connections both indoors and in highly mobile outdoor environments as well as in city centres need to be met simultaneously by numerous wireless devices sharing the same system resources. This inevitably creates a challenging operating environment which is highly dynamic and unpredictable.

In this context, the effects of the user's head, body and hands as well as the variety of usage positions of wireless devices pose further challenges to antenna design engineers. Indeed, a modern mobile phone can be used in various ways, for example, for gaming, browsing or talking. In the first two cases, the user may hold the phone with one or two hands in front of his body. On the other hand, ...