Over-the-air performance testing of a real 4G LTE base station in a reverberation chamber

Abstract

Fourth generation (4G) cellular systems have been nowadays rolled out already in several countries in the world. With networks open to commercial use, one of the key issues is how the quality perceived by the user is influenced by multipath propagation, like it may happen in indoor locations or in any kind of places where electromagnetic waves are partially reflected by walls and other objects. In order to verify this, the signal of a real 4G base station connected to the real radio access network of Telecom Italia has been transmitted into a reverberation chamber where a client was running FTPs using a 4G capable USB dongle as a modem. This paper describe the tests that have been performed and focus on how changes in propagation conditions affected the performances perceived by the user.