Design and Implementation of an Ultrabroadband Millimeter-Wavelength Vector Sliding Correlator Channel Sounder and In-Building Multipath Measurements at 2.5 & 60 GHz

Over the past decade, the market for wireless service has grown at an unprecedented rate. The industry has grown from cellular phones and pagers to broadband and ultra-broadband (also called ultra-wideband) wireless services that can provide voice, data, and full-motion video in real time. This growing hunger for faster data rates and larger bandwidths has prompted a need for a deeper understanding of the wireless channels upon which these devices communicate. In order for the visions of real time full-motion video, multimedia, and high speed data delivery inherent in the 3rd and 4th generations of wireless communication standards to be fully realized, system design engineers must have a thorough understanding of the wireless channels upon which these devices operate. Additionally, for these networks to deliver their promised data rates, they must operate at very high microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies, where large segments of spectrum are readily obtained.

Unfortunately, little is known about the propagation characteristics at these frequencies and bandwidths. As a consequence, there has been a significant demand for wireless test equipment that is capable of characterizing these new wireless channels. The objective of this research was to design and develop a wireless test instrument that can not only characterize these new wireless channels, but has the portability to be quickly and easily re-located to various measurement sites, as well as the flexibility to characterize a wide variety of frequencies and bandwidths in addition to the ultrawideband channels investigated in this work. This measurement system is also designed to be capable of characterizing both the magnitude and phase response of these wireless channels, which not only provides a more complete channel characteristic, but the potential capability to measure the Doppler spectrum introduced by a dynamic channel.