Absolute Phase for Mobile Channels

The absolute phase has been identified as a new parameter for the mobile fading channel, and its statistics have been recently analyzed. This article reviews the absolute phase, in particular, in the context of signal and scattering models of mobile communications, and presents measurements for three typical scenarios: strong LOS, weak LOS, and two-path arrangement. Some potential location-aware applications fostered by the absolute phase are demonstrated using the measurement data. The results show that the absolute phase collected from one antenna can be used to estimate the AOA, velocity, and position of a receiver relative to the transmitter. The estimation achieves high accuracy in the strong LOS scenario and can also provide useful information in the weak LOS and two path scenarios. These results motivate future work to use the absolute phase in many applications, especially for indoor localization.