Testing a MIMO Channel for Stationarity

Abstract: There is an increasing demand for better communication networks, e.g. better data rates and an improved bandwidth. As a response there is a lot of research being invested towards MIMO systems as a possible solution.In this paper data from a MIMO system with a fixed transmitter (8 antennas) and a mobile receiver (4 antennas) was investigated. The goal was to estimate the duration, during which, the MIMO system could be considered stationary. This was done by first estimating a correlation matrix for every time sample and then using the Correlation Matrix Distance function to measure how similar or dissimilar the different correlation matrices were within fixed time intervals. This was looked at from both the transmitter and receiver side. The result shows that the stationarity lasts for about 1.34 seconds and 5.2 seconds respectively for the receiver and transmitter.