Flexible real-time MIMO channel sounder for multidimensional polarimetric parameter estimation

This paper describes the architecture of a fully parallel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel sounder. It has been designed to give in real-time the full polarimetric channel matrix which is then exploited to display, for example, the bi-directional channel characteristics as the angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD) of the multipath components. This 16×16 sounder, working at a center frequency of 1.35 GHz, uses an OFDM transmission scheme with an 80 MHz bandwidth. Applications of this sounder are then illustrated by studying the outdoor to indoor propagation characteristics.