Measurement-Based Analysis and Modeling of Multimode Channel Behaviors in Spherical Vector Wave Domain

Abstract

This paper establishes the analytical model and analyzes the statistical behaviors of multimode channels in spherical vector wave (SVW) domain based on the microcellular radio channel measurement in downtown Helsinki at 5.3 GHz band. The multimode channel is the representation of radio wave propagation in the form of the SVW mode coupling between the transmit and receive antennas. The multimode channel does not rely on particular realizations of antennas at link ends, since any transmitting/receiving/scattering fields associated with an antenna can be modeled as a weighted sum of SVW modes where different antennas have different mode weights. The multimode channels are converted from the plane wave channel model parameters that are extracted from measured channels of coherent snapshots along 6 different routes in Helsinki. Based on the analysis of various first and second order statistics of the multimode channels, the main findings can be summarized as follows: 1) the multimode channels are power imbalanced; 2) the envelope short-term fading statistics of the multimode channels can be described with Rician probability distributions with varying K-factors; 3) the auto-correlations of multimode channels along the spatial translation of a mobile node in a propagation environment present varying coherent distances; 4) the cross-correlations of multimode channels vary with the spatial translation too. The obtained results and the proposed multimode channel model provide invaluable insights into the design of antenna systems tailored to a specific propagation environment. Indeed, antenna systems at both link ends can be devised such that the multimode channels with higher power, larger coherent distance and smaller cross-correlation are excited resulting in multiple-input multiple-output antenna systems that exploit efficiently the degrees of freedom of the propagation channel.