Laboratory-Based Reference Channels for Millimeter-Wave Wireless Device Measurements

Industrial and consumer wireless devices increasingly make use of millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies to meet requirements for bandwidth and latency. The complex propagation environment and design of phased-array antennas pose a dual challenge to mmWave implementation. We have developed a mmWave testbed for industrial internet-of-things devices, which implements realistic mmWave channels in a repeatable and enclosed environment. Synthetic-aperture techniques are used to capture real-world channel information, replicate key channel features within our testbed, and, ultimately, will provide a traceable reference measurement against which mmWave devices may be compared. In this paper, an overview of the testbed is presented, and initial measurement results are provided for an “exemplar” industrial mmWave channel.