Large scale characteristics of urban cellular wideband channels at 11 GHz

High frequency spectrum is expected to offer a wide bandwidth for future broadband cellular networks. This paper presents the measurement results of the outdoor urban cellular wideband channels at 11 GHz. The measurements at various urban cellular environments that are classified into macrocell, microcell and street-cell were conducted, where a wideband 24 × 24 MIMO channel sounder having 400 MHz signal bandwidth and dual-polarized 12-element uniform circular arrays were used. This paper presents large scale characteristics of 11 GHz wideband channels including path losses, shadowing, cell coverage, polarization properties and delay spread, which were calculated by the polarimetric beamforming both at transmitter and receiver. Large shadowing loss of approximately 20 dB was observed in NLoS condition, and from the outage calculation it was seen that the cell coverage with omni-directional antennas is limited to less than 100 m for 30 dB SNR. From the power delay profile (PDP), small RMS delay spreads with the mean value of less than 20 ns were observed.