Channel Sounding System for MM-Wave Bands and Characterization of Indoor Propagation at 28 GHz

The aim of this work is to present a vector
network analyzer (VNA) based channel sounding sys-
tem capable of performing measurements in the range
from 2 to 50 GHz. Further, this paper describes an
indoor measurement campaign performed at 26 to 30
GHz. The sounding system is capable of receiving two
channels and transmitting one. Using this feature a
channel measurement has been performed using both a
directional horn antenna and a virtual uniform circular
array (UCA) at the same time. This allows for com-
parative studies of measured channels with two differ-
ent antennas in a simultaneous way. The measurement
has been conducted with 42 measurement positions dis-
tributed along a 10 m long path through an indoor lab-
oratory environment. The transmitter was positioned
such that measurements were conducted both in line-
of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios.
The measurements showed good agreement between the
measurement data collected with the horn antenna and
the data collected with the UCA. The propagation environment was found to be sparse both in delay and
angular domain for the given scenario. Based on the
performed measurement campaign together with validation measurements of the system stability, it is found
that the system works as expected.