Mobile Station Spatio-Temporal Multipath Clustering of an Estimated Wideband MIMO Double-Directional Channel of a Small Urban 4.5 GHz Macrocell

Multipath clusters in a wireless channel could act as additional channels for spatial multiplexing MIMO systems. However, identifying them in order to come up with better cluster channel models has been a hurdle due to how they are defined. This paper considers the identification of these clusters at the mobile station through a middle ground approach—combining a globally optimized automatic clustering approach and manual clustering of the physical scatterers. By including the scattering verification in the cluster identification, better insight into their behavior in wireless channels would be known, especially the physical realism and eventually a more satisfactorily accurate cluster channel model could be proposed. The results show that overlapping clusters make up the majority of the observed channel, which stems from automatic clustering, whereas only a few clusters have clear delineation of their dispersion. In addition, it is difficult to judge the physical realism of overlapping clusters. This further points to a need for the physical interpretation and verification of clustering results, which is an initial step taken in this paper. From the identification results, scattering mechanisms of the clusters are presented and also their selected first and second order statistics.