Advances in over-the-air performance testing methods for mmWave devices and 5G communications

The boundary array technique introduced at AMTA 2006 has recently become the reference standard for over-the-air performance testing of wireless MIMO devices. While the concepts developed then are viable for testing of today's LTE handsets, the progression towards 5G technologies will pose new challenges that will require an alternate approach. Although the need to perform similar spatial environment based testing remains, the push towards mmWave communication links with beamforming arrays containing potentially hundreds of elements and extremely narrow beams will exceed the practical resolution limits of the boundary array approach. At the same time, these devices will incorporate chip scale antennas that are tightly integrated to the radio design, requiring a valid over-the-air test methodology to be able to evaluate the radio performance.