Long Range Channel Predictions for Broadband Systems : Predictor antenna experiments and interpolation of Kalman predictions

Abstract: The field of wireless communication is under massive development and the demands on the cellular system, especially, are constantly increasing as the utilizing devices are increasing in number and diversity. A key component of wireless communication is the knowledge of the channel, i.e, how the signal is affected when sent over the wireless medium. Channel prediction is one concept which can improve current techniques or enable new ones in order to increase the performance of the cellular system. Firstly, this report will investigate the concept of a predictor antenna on new, extensive measurements which represent many different environments and scenarios. A predictor antenna is a separate antenna that is placed in front of the main antenna on the roof of a vehicle. The predictor antenna could enable good channel prediction for high velocity vehicles. The measurements show to be too noisy to be used directly in the predictor antenna concept but show potential if the measurements can be noise-filtered without distorting the signal. The use of low-pass filter and Kalman filter to do this, did not give the desired results but the technique to do this should be further investigated. Secondly, a interpolation technique will be presented which utilizes predictions with different prediction horizon by estimating intermediate channel components using interpolation. This could save channel feedback resources as well as give a better robustness to bad channel predictions by letting fresh, local, channel predictions be used as quality reference of the interpolated channel estimates. For a linear interpolation between 8-step and 18-step Kalman predictions with Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) of -15.02 dB and -10.88 dB, the interpolated estimates had an average NMSE of -13.14 dB, while lowering the required feedback data by about 80 %. The use of a warning algorithm reduced the NMSE by a further 0.2 dB. It mainly eliminated the largest prediction error which otherwise could lead to retransmission, which is not desired.