Instantaneous Direction of Arrival Measurements in Mobile Radio Channels Using Virtual Circular Array Antennas

Two methods for the estimation of direction of arrival in mobile radio channels by means of a virtual uniform circular array are presented and experimentally validated. The methods rely on the MUSIC algorithm and can be applied for measurements in the mm-wave bands (6-100GHz) as required for future 5G systems. They are capable of measurement cycles of up to 100 Hz which are very short in comparison of state-of- the-art approaches. Thus the approaches are suitable to collect a high number of channel realizations even in time-variant outdoor environments. With respect to the verification measurements at 28GHz, a modular instrument based measurement setup is introduced.

I. Introduction

With the dawn of 5G communication systems, the development of mobile radios in the new “mm-wave” frequency bands from 6-100 GHz has gained massive momentum [1]. Due to the specific nature of this new spectrum bands, such radios will rely extensively on multi-antenna techniques like beamforming and MIMO [2] to exploit the spatial properties of the underlying radio channel.