Antenna Pattern Impact on MIMO OTA Testing

This paper investigates the impact of the DUT antenna pattern on the test area performance for multi-probe based MIMO OTA setup in terms of received voltage and spatial correlation. The plane wave synthesis (PWS) technique has been proposed for vertical polarization in the literature, where the goal is to approximate plane waves with arbitrary directions. The received voltage at the antenna terminal depends on the antenna radiation pattern and the impinging plane waves. A novel closed form technique to reproduce the received voltage with arbitrary incoming plane waves based on trigonometric interpolation is presented. The proposed technique provides a closed form solution for the PWS when the probe ring radius is infinite. The proposed technique shows that the impact of the antenna pattern on the induced received voltage accuracy is ruled by Nyquist sampling theory. Furthermore, the impact of the antenna pattern on spatial correlation accuracy for prefaded signal synthesis (PFS) technique is investigated as well. Simulation and measurement results show that the number of required probes depend directly on the DUT antenna pattern. To test realistic DUTs with higher variations in directivity, we need more probes to maintain the same received voltage and spatial correlation accuracy level.