Empirical and Simulated Performance Evaluation of Distributed Massive MIMO

We describe a distributed massive MIMO measurement campaign in an urban vehicular setting, where wireless channel measurements are acquired with two mobile stations equipped with a single antenna each and 32 antennas at the base station partitioned in two groups of 16 antennas each. We fit and assess various statistical distributions to characterize the observed propagation conditions and their dependency on time and space. Key parameters from the measurement are compared to simulations with a ray-tracing tool considering the geometry of the scenario. We evaluate distributed and collocated base station antenna setups in terms of singular value spread and achievable spectral efficiency for both measured and simulated channels and draw conclusions for optimal base station antenna placement.