Channel measurements in an open-pit mine using USRPs: 5G — Expect the unexpected

Abstract

In this paper, we describe and analyze the results of a radio channel measurement campaign in an extreme industrial environment; a large open-pit copper mine targeted by next generation's highly voiced device communications. We present a practical and efficient method to perform robust and high-sensitivity impulse response measurements without a common clock reference using the widely spread USRP hardware. With this technique, we performed channel sounding on a large number of locations within the mine. One important observation is that the radio channel's impulse response in an open-pit mine can often be more than 10 µs long, and much unlike the responses normally associated with Wi-Fi and mobile cellular radio systems, which poses serious design challenges for future 5G radio systems.