Estimation of MIMO Channel Capacity From Phase-Noise Impaired Measurements

Due to the significantly reduced cost and effort for system calibration Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) is a commonly used technique to switch between the transmit and receive antennas in Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radio channel sounding. Nonetheless, Baum et al., have shown that phase noise of the transmitter and receiver local oscillators, when it is assumed to be a white Gaussian random process, can cause large errors of the estimated channel capacity of a low-rank MIMO channel when the standard channel matrix estimator is used. Experimental evidence shows that consecutive phase noise samples affecting measurement samples collected with real TDMMIMO channel sounders are correlated.