Effectiveness of a fading emulator in evaluating the performance of MIMO systems by comparison with a propagation test

This paper presents a MIMO spatial fading emulator, used to represent a street microcell environment. The fading emulator can reproduce a multipath radio propagation environment with either a uniform or non-uniform angular power spectrum (APS) in the horizontal plane. In this paper, we used the emulator to measure the 2-by-2 MIMO characteristics of four handset arrays with two monopoles in a multipath environment with one spatial cluster of incoming waves. From our investigation, good agreement was obtained between the results from the emulator and data measured in a radio propagation test in a street microcell. This demonstrates that the emulator is effective in evaluating the MIMO performance in a multipath propagation environment.