Next generation wireless systems are moving towards ever increasing data rates, higher spectral efficiency and improved quality of service. This development has largely been facilitated by advanced terminals with multiple antennas. However, the use of multiple antennas not only opens up new opportunities, but also presents new testing challenges.
For multi-antenna devices, like cellular phones in LTE and laptops utilizing WLAN, WiMAX and LTE technologies, the traditional approach of testing the antenna characteristics and the signal processing performance separately does not assess the terminal performance realistically.
This is because the conductive testing does not realistically take into account the antenna effects of multi-antenna devices. Because a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radio channel is a combination of the antenna characteristics and the radio propagation conditions, they need to be tested together in a controlled environment by a MIMO Over-the-Air (OTA) test system consisting of a radio channel emulator and anechoic chamber.
Meeting the Challenge
That is the challenge and the solution has been developed in the form of the EB Propsim F8 MIMO OTA emulator that utilizes the companyís patented file-based emulation approach, which is a pre-requisite to convert the geometry-based stochastic channel models to MIMO OTA models.
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