Comparison of time- and angular dispersion between channel sounding measurements and ray tracing in CoMP-MIMO channels

The need of incorporating Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology into radio network planning and optimization rises dramatically for network operators. One main question to answer is how accurate MIMO channel models reflect the real MIMO channel. To answer, we already compared eigenvalue statistics of various single-user (SU) and multi-user (MU) Cooperative Multi-Point (CoMP)-MIMO scenarios [1, 2, 3, 4] to verify a 3D ray tracing channel simulator with channel sounding measurements in the 2.53 GHz range, a major frequency band for LTE transmission in Europe. This contribution adds a comprehensive verification of time- and angular dispersion characteristics by carefully analyzing results of a dedicated high-resolution measurement campaign. These extra measurement data allow for an intermediate step of high-resolution post-processing of the measurement data [5, 6] to estimate radio channel parameters. These estimated parameters are then directly compared with ray tracing channel simulation results, especially in the rarely analyzed angular domain.