Abstract:
In this paper we investigate the application of
Compressed Sensing (CS) to MIMO channel sounding in the
spatial domain. A compressive spatial channel sounder is proposed and evaluated based on real scenarios showing advantages
in terms of time, hardware complexity and resolution. In particular, in the case where we use time division duplex for measuring the MIMO channel (in the form of antenna switching at the
transmitter and/or the receiver), the proposed approach reduces
the total number of switching periods, which implies a reduced
channel acquisition time and thus an improved Doppler bandwidth. Alternatively, if we use multiple receive RF chains for the
measurement, the compression allows to reduce the number of
RF chains, which is a relevant advantage in terms of the overall
receiver complexity, the amount of data to be processed in the
digital domain (e.g., FPGA), power consumption, as well as RF
hardware calibration. On the other hand, for the same measurement time and/or hardware complexity, one can increase
the number of array elements to cover a larger aperture and so
achieving better performance in terms of resolution.