Measurements and analysis of a 4×4 vehicle-to-ground MIMO channel using SAGE

The widely used broadband wireless technology enables a novel application of providing high-quality communications between vehicles and traffic control centers, which is collectively referred to as vehicle-to-ground communications. Channel modeling is in rapidly increasing demand to design and optimize the vehicle-to-ground communication systems. And practical channel models are only available when accurate estimations of the channel parameters are feasible. By adopting quadrature encoding and spectrum spreading, a novel and low-cost measurement method is proposed in this paper. The method can be implemented to achieve channel matrix accurately and furthermore determinate the parameters of a MIMO channel by using the space-alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm. Then the method was carried out in a measurement of a vehicle-mounted 4×4 MIMO system. Both large-scale and small-scale fading are investigated and analyzed. A path loss (PL) model and characteristics of channel parameters including PDP, K-factor, angle of arrival (AOA), angle of departure (AOD) and spatial correlation matrixes for V2G channel modeling are given based on the estimations. These results offer a valuable reference for future studies.