Measured User Correlation in Outdoor-to-Indoor Massive MIMO Scenarios

The performance of a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is mainly determined by the correlation of user channels. Applying channel models without spatial correlation or spatially inconsistent channel models for performance analysis leads to an under-estimation of spatial correlation and therefore to overly optimistic system performance. This is especially pronounced when the wireless channel is modeled as i.i.d. Rayleigh fading for users in a rich scattering environment, for example, for indoor users. To analyze the spatial channel correlation in massive MIMO systems, we performed wireless channel measurements in three different scenarios. In each scenario, we measure 148 receiver positions, spread over a length of almost 9m. Since the wireless channel statistics change with receiver position, we perform a stationarity analysis. We provide a statistical analysis of the measured channel in terms of amplitude distribution and user-side spatial correlation within the region of stationarity. This analysis shows that, even for a deep-indoor user location, the spatial correlation is significantly higher compared to a Rician channel model with the same K factor. We model the measured channel by means of a Rician channel model and a spatially consistent channel model, which is based on the scenario geometry, to provide an insight for the observed propagation phenomena. Results show that the user correlation is not negligible for massive MIMO in outdoor-to-indoor scenarios. The achievable spectral efficiency with linear precoding is 20% lower compared to the Rician channel model, even for large inter-user distances of 6m.