An Efficient Probe Selection Method for 5G Base Station OTA Testing with MPAC Setup

Abstract

Over-the-Air (OTA) testing, due to its capacity of reproducing the desired radio channels in lab environments, is considered as the promising testing solution for 5G multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) devices, especially for 5G massive MIMO base station (BS). A sectored multi-probe anechoic chamber (MPAC) OTA system for 5G massive MIMO BS testing has been proposed and discussed in many literatures. The probe selection is essential for 5G BS OTA testing, since the MPAC system cost is determined by the ports of channel emulator, i.e., the number of OTA probes. However, the classical convex-optimization-based probe selection method becomes complexity-prohibitive compared with the 2D MPAC system, due to the large amount of candidate probes. This paper proposes a novel probe selection for 5G BS OTA testing with MPAC setup based on the compressed sensing theory. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can achieve high performance over single-cluster and multi-cluster channel models, in terms of high emulation accuracy and low computational complexity.