Spatio-temporal radio channel characteristics in urban macrocells

The performance assessment of new mobile radio base station (BS) transceiver concepts with adaptive intelligent antennas requires realistic directional radio channel models. An appropriate model is derived from the results of an extensive uplink sounding campaign performed at 1.9 GHz in a urban macrocell within the City of Frankfurt. In the experiments the wideband sounder RUSK XL was applied for synthetic aperture reception. The directional multipath propagation is characterised by means of delays, directions of arrival (DOA) at the BS antenna array and mean powers of the multipath components. The coupled delay-DOA-power information is determined by an adaptation of the 2-D unitary ESPRIT algorithm. It can be used directly to configure fading simulators for multiple antenna reception which reflect real-world small-area radio channel properties in simulations at the link level. Additionally, probability distribution functions for excess delays, DOAs and mean powers are derived from the measurement results. They are useful for consideration of directional propagation effects in investigations of the cellular system behaviour.