A Novel Automatic Cluster Tracking Algorithm

On the way to answer the controversial question "What is a cluster?", we introduce a novel cluster tracking mechanism which is based on the multi-path component distance (MCD). We perform a temporal tracking of cluster centroids in the multidimensional parameter domain, starting from cluster estimates obtained by a recently introduced framework which automatically clusters parametric MIMO channel data. To validate our algorithm, we use both synthetic and measured MIMO channels. We generate the synthetic channel using the IlmProp simulation tool. For the real-world channels we use data from an outdoor measurement campaign in a rural area. Simulation results with synthetic channels validate the tracking algorithm, while its application on measurement data shows the occurrence of several clusters with different lifetimes