Effects of angle spread in a complex outdoor environment at 2.4 GHz

It is useful to know the true extent of angle spreading - specifically, it´s effect on AOA estimation and beamforming - in a variety of environments. This paper presents a study of angle spread at 2.4 GHz in a complex, outdoor environment. Due to limitations in array aperture and stationarity of the propagation channel, direct measurements of angle spread are extraordinarily difficult and unreliable. In this study, we instead demonstrate the effects of angle spread by comparing measurements of the angle spectrum and spatial covariance to those obtained in a carefully-controlled line-of-sight For the scenarios evaluated here, it is found that the environment has a dramatic effect on both the ability to form beams and the rank of the spatial covariance matrix.