High-resolution angle-of-arrival measurement of the mobile radio channel

The accurate planning of microcellular mobile radio networks requires a tho rough understanding of the mechanisms that govern radio wave propagation in urban environments, Combined measurements of time delays and angles-of-arr ival (AoA's), both in azimuth and elevation, of individual multipath contri butions are expected to be very helpful in the validation and improvement o f existing ray-tracing propagation models. To this end, we have applied the uniform circular array (UCA)-MUSIC angular superresolution algorithm to co mplex impulse response measurement data obtained from a synthetic uniform c ircular array. Beamspace processing and forward/backward averaging were app lied to cope with strongly correlated signals. The presented experimental r esults show that our approach is capable of identifying the dominant multip aths in actual mobile propagation environments.