Channel Measurement and Characterization for Indoor Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO

ZHANG Yu; ZHANG Hanqing; YANG Songjiang; ZHANG Jiliang; YANG Dan; LI Liming

doi:10.11999/JEIT260496

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ZHANG Yu, ZHANG Hanqing, YANG Songjiang, ZHANG Jiliang, YANG Dan, LI Liming. Channel Measurement and Characterization for Indoor Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260496

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ZHANG Yu, ZHANG Hanqing, YANG Songjiang, ZHANG Jiliang, YANG Dan, LI Liming. Channel Measurement and Characterization for Indoor Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260496

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Channel Measurement and Characterization for Indoor Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO

doi: 10.11999/JEIT260496 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT260496

1.
School of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China
2.
School of Information Science and Engineering, NingboTech University, Ningbo 315100, China

Funds: National Natural Science Foundation of China(62573096,62401644), LiaoNing Revitalization Talents Program (XLYC2403116), General Scientific Research Project of Department of Education of Zhejiang Province (Y202352276)

Received Date: 2026-04-23
Accepted Date: 2026-09-28
Rev Recd Date: 2026-09-28

Available Online: 2026-10-10

Abstract

Abstract

Objective Millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands offer abundant spectrum resources, making them ideal for high-speed indoor transmission and high-precision sensing applications. However, lacking sufficient empirical validation from ultra-wideband measurements, the understanding of how dense multipath components (DMCs) affect channel sparsity and multipath parameter extraction in complex indoor Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) environments remains limited. This paper conducts a comprehensive channel measurement and characterization campaign to investigate physical propagation mechanisms and evaluate the indoor positioning potential of ultra-wideband massive MIMO systems. Methods A massive MIMO channel measurement platform is established using a Vector Network Analyzer. The system operates at a center frequency of 32 GHz with a 16 GHz bandwidth. On the receiver side, a precision turntable constructs a 16×16 virtual Uniform Rectangular Array (URA). The measurement campaign covers a typical indoor environment featuring both Line-of-Sight (LOS) and NLOS scenarios. Key channel characteristics, including path loss, power delay profile, delay spread, and delay-wavenumber spectrum, are extracted. Furthermore, a multipath-assisted single-point positioning framework based on virtual anchors is implemented to evaluate localization performance across different measurement bandwidths. Results and Discussions Measurement results reveal significant differences in multipath structures and energy distributions between LOS and NLOS channels. In the time domain, LOS channels exhibit strong spatiotemporal sparsity. Conversely, obstructed NLOS environments are dominated by DMCs due to severe physical blockage and complex multipath effects, resulting in significant energy tails and large delay spreads (Fig. 8, Fig. 10). Spatially, the delay-wavenumber spectrums confirm the high angular resolution for user separation (Fig. 11). Crucially, the comparative positioning experiments across different measured bandwidths demonstrate that the 16 GHz ultra-wideband effectively decouples dense adjacent multipath components, significantly improving the accuracy of multipath parameter extraction. This provides robust virtual anchors for multipath-assisted positioning. The 16 GHz system achieves a low mean positioning error of 0.052 m, showcasing significant robustness and accuracy advantages over the narrower 8 GHz and 4 GHz bandwidths (Table 5). Conclusions This study provides a systematic characterization of indoor mmWave massive MIMO channels. The results identify that channel sparsity is highly scenario-dependent, necessitating the inclusion of DMCs in future NLOS channel modeling. Moreover, the empirical localization analysis confirms that ultra-high spatiotemporal resolution is indispensable for robust indoor multipath extraction and positioning applications, providing a solid experimental foundation for next-generation network design.
- Channel measurement and characteristics, Millimeter-wave,
- Massive MIMO,
- Ultra-wideband,
- Indoor scenario,
- XXX

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References(25)

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