A Non-Stationary Wideband Channel Model for Massive MIMO Communication Systems

This paper proposes a novel non-stationary wideband multi-confocal ellipse two dimensional (2-D) channel model for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. Spherical wavefront is assumed in the proposed channel model, instead of the plane wavefront assumption used in conventional MIMO channel models. In addition, the birth-death process is incorporated into the proposed model to capture the dynamic properties of clusters on both the array and time axes. Statistical properties of the channel model such as the spacetime-frequency correlation function and power imbalance on the antenna array are studied. The impact of the spherical wavefront assumption on the statistical properties of the channel model is investigated. Furthermore, numerical analysis shows that the proposed channel model is able to capture specific characteristics of massive MIMO channel as observed in measurements.