Over-the-Air Emulation of Electronically Adjustable Rician MIMO Channels in a Programmable-Metasurface-Stirred Reverberation Chamber
Résumé
We experimentally investigate the feasibility of evaluating multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio equipment under adjustable Rician fading channel conditions in a programmable-metasurface-stirred (PM-stirred) reverberation chamber (RC). Whereas within the "smart radio environment" paradigm PMs offer partial control over the channels to the wireless system, in our use case the PM emulates the uncontrollable fading. We implement a desired Rician K-factor by sweeping a suitably sized subset of all meta-atoms through random configurations. We discover in our setup an upper bound on the accessible K-factors for which the statistics of the channel coefficient distributions closely follow the sought-after Rician distribution. We also discover a lower bound on the accessible K-factors in our setup: there are unstirred paths that never encounter the PM, and paths that encounter the PM are not fully stirred because the average of the meta-atoms' accessible polarizability values is not zero (i.e., the meta-atoms have a non-zero "structural" cross-section). We corroborate these findings with experiments in an anechoic chamber, physics-compliant PhysFad simulations with Lorentzian vs "ideal" meta-atoms, and theoretical analysis. Our work clarifies the scope of applicability of PM-stirred RCs for MIMO Rician channel emulation, as well as electromagnetic compatibility test.
Mots clés
- MIMO
- reconfigurable intelligent surface
- structural scattering
- PhysFad
- physics-compliant channel model
- over-the-air testing
- wireless channel emulation
- electronic stirring
- Rician fading
- reverberation chamber
- Programmable metasurface
- Programmable metasurface reverberation chamber Rician fading electronic stirring wireless channel emulation over-the-air testing MIMO physics-compliant channel model PhysFad structural scattering reconfigurable intelligent surface
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