Automatic Over-The-Air Evaluation of a Large-Scale MIMO Antenna Using a Switch Circuit

In this paper, we propose an automatic method to evaluate a large-scale MIMO antenna in fading emulator using a switch circuit to measure the channel response of the antenna elements. In the proposed daisy chain MIMO antenna, the channel responses of the subarrays are obtained numerically with a personal computer by combining two antenna elements. Then, over-the-air (OTA) evaluations of the 64 × 64 daisy-chain MIMO antenna were performed, and it was verified that high-speed communication could be achieved regardless of the direction of the incident wave, demonstrating the efficacy of the automatic OTA evaluation method of the large-scale MIMO antenna using a switch circuit.