Attitude estimation for base station antennas based on downlink channel statistics

In this contribution, a maximum-likelihood-based approach is proposed for estimating the attitudes of sectoring base station (BS) antennas based on the power of the received signals observed by multiple user equipments (UEs) in a cellular network. The proposed method calculates the likelihood of the antenna attitude by taking into account both the large-scale fading statistics, i.e. path loss, shadowing, and the small-scale fading attributed to multi-path propagation. The performance of the method is evaluated by simulations in both urban and rural scenarios, where a random-propagation-graph method is applied to generating realistic channel impulse responses by using directional antenna patterns. Results show that by using the proposed method, accurate estimates of the antenna attitude can be obtained when the observations from more UEs are available and the line-of-sight (LoS) condition dominates the channels between the BS and the UEs.