Experimental analysis of dense multipath components in an industrial environment

This work presents an analysis of dense multipath components (DMC) in an industrial workshop. Radio channel sounding was performed with a vector network analyzer and virtual antenna arrays. The specular and dense multipath components were estimated with the RiMAX algorithm. The DMC covariance structure of the RiMAX data model was validated. Two DMC parameters were studied: the distribution of radio channel power between specular and dense multipath, and the DMC reverberation time. The DMC power accounted for 23% to 70% of the total channel power. A significant difference between DMC powers in line-of-sight and nonline-of-sight was observed, which can be largely attributed to the power of the line-of-sight multipath component. In agreement with room electromagnetics theory, the DMC reverberation time was found to be nearly constant. Overall, DMC in the industrial workshop is more important than in office environments: it occupies a fraction of the total channel power that is 4% to 13% larger. The industrial environment absorbs on average 29% of the electromagnetic energy compared to 45%-51% for office environments in literature: this results in a larger reverberation time in the former environment. These findings are explained by the highly cluttered and metallic nature of the workshop

Impact of polarization diversity in massive MIMO for industry 4.0

The massive polarimetric radio channel is evaluated in an indoor industrial scenario at 3.5 GHz using a 10×10 uniform rectangular array (URA). The analysis is based on (1) propagation characteristics like the average received gain and the power to interference ratio from the Gram matrix and (2) system-oriented metrics such as sum-rate capacity with maximum-ratio transmitter (MRT). The results clearly show the impact of polarization diversity in an industrial scenario and how it can considerably improve different aspects of the system design. Results for sum-rate capacity are promising and show that the extra degree of freedom, provided by polarization diversity, can optimize the performance of a very simple precoder, the MRT

Polarization properties of specular and dense multipath components in a large industrial hall

This paper presents an analysis of the polarization characteristics of specular and dense multipath components (SMC & DMC) in a large industrial hall based on frequency-domain channel sounding experiments at 1.3 GHz with 22 MHz bandwidth. The RiMAX maximum-likelihood estimator is used to extract the full polarimetric SMC and DMC from the measurement data by taking into account the polarimetric radiating patterns of the dual-polarized antennas. Cross-polar discrimination (XPD) values are presented for the measured channels and for the SMC and DMC separately

Polarimetric distance-dependent models for large hall scenarios

A comprehensive polarimetric distance-dependent model of the power delay profile (PDP) and path gain is proposed. The model includes both specular multipath components (SMCs) and dense multipath components (DMC), the latter being modeled with an exponential and power law. The parameters of the model were estimated from polarimetric measurements of a large hall radio channel under line-of-sight (LOS) conditions at 1.3 GHz with a dedicated procedure. The validity and robustness of the proposed approach are provided by the good agreement between the polarimetric data and models for the investigated transmitter-receiver distance range. Furthermore, the description of the radio channel with path loss models is discussed for cases where the DMC is included, and a two-step method to compute the path loss characteristics directly from the measured data is developed. The results of this contribution highlight the fact that a complete polarimetric description of all propagation mechanisms and related path loss models is desired to design faithful polarimetric radio channel models

Determination of the whole-body absorption cross section of a phantom using RiMAX

The reverberation time has been measured in a reverberation chamber for different loads and for a cross polarized transceiver at the frequency of 1.8 GHz. We determine the whole-body absorption cross section of a canonical phantom using a maximum-likehood high-resolution channel parameters estimator - RiMAX - and good agreement has been obtained with the result from the numerical simulations. The relative error between the simulated values and the RiMAX based measured values is less than 1.3 %