On Simple-Sectored Multi-Probe Anechoic Chamber Design for mmWave Adaptive Terminal

Over-the-air (OTA) testing of millimeter-wave (mmWave) adaptive terminal is expected to be an essential step in the product design and development stage. In this paper, we investigated the simple-sectored multi-probe anechoic chamber (SS-MPAC) configuration for testing mmWave adaptive terminal under fading channel conditions. By summarizing the characteristics of the adaptive terminal antenna, four representative antenna sub-arrays were utilized to evaluate the testing performance under two spatial channel models. We also discussed two evaluation metrics to assess the accuracy of the SS-MPAC configuration. The results indicated that, the configuration parameters of SS-MPAC design were determined mainly by the position of the adaptive antenna sub-arrays and the half power beamwidth (HPBW) of adaptive antenna systems. Furthermore, to ensure accurate emulation of spatial correlation between multiple active sub-arrays on the terminal, a much more expensive setup configuration is expected, compared to single active sub-array (single adaptive array, or multiple sub-arrays with switch structure) terminal case. These findings are valuable inputs for the ongoing New Radio (NR) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) OTA work in the standardization.