Test setup for anechoic room based MIMO OTA testing of LTE terminals

Over-The-Air (OTA) performance testing is becoming a key method for Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) enabled devices as it allows evaluation of most aspects of the radio communication performance. This way of testing has become a very important research topic especially because MIMO is now introduced into, for example, LTE and WiMAX systems. The main purpose of this testing is to validate whether the user equipment will have a good performance in real use. CTIA, 3GPP and COST are spending a big effort in standardizing the OTA testing procedure which is much more complex than similar single SISO OTA testing. The CTIA MIMO OTA SubGorup (MOSG) is comparing each proposed MIMO OTA technique to establish, first, an exact methodology for each technique and second, to ensure each of them offers comparable results. This contribution focuses on the multi-probe anechoic chamber solution and summarizes the activities related to the MIMO OTA lab being built at Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark and the testing being performed.