Antenna assessment plays an important role in communication systems in order to assure high signal quality levels and reliable performance. The main issue to solve, is the limitation of the current available evaluation techniques. In most cases, antenna ratings consider just the scattering parameters together with the radiation characteristics, which does not necessarily correlate with the system level functionality. On the other hand, advanced methods include field measurements in the evaluation process, which may lead to unreliable results due to lack of statistically representative measures. In this work, a novel evaluation technique is presented, which merges results from both simulations and measurements to combine the advantages of each of them. The presented method starts with the antennas scattering parameters and 3D far field measurements, involves ray tracing algorithms for the communication channel calculations and analyses real radio signals using vector signal generators and laboratory setup. The parameters based on the receiver signal quality are considered to distinguish between the different examined antennas. The Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) signals are performed to prove the concept. However, the hardware and software parts of the evaluation method form a general platform that is applicable in many other communication systems like the Fifth generation of cellular mobile commuications (5G). The evaluation method is realized and applied on a large number of antennas. The achieved results show good agreement with the field measurement statistical results on the same antennas and similar propagations environment. This makes it possible to save the high costs of the field measurements and achieve reliable results, in much shorter time. In other words, traditional simulation-only assessments lack matching to measurements and stand alone field measurement can not be repeated to compare the performance of different devices. Therefore, this work provides a new evaluation method which provides reproducible reliable results based on the flexibility of the simulations and the reliability of the measurements. Moreover, the trends of the statistical results show good correlation between the performance indicators achieved from the new method and field measurements.    «

Antenna assessment plays an important role in communication systems in order to assure high signal quality levels and reliable performance. The main issue to solve, is the limitation of the current available evaluation techniques. In most cases, antenna ratings consider just the scattering parameters together with the radiation characteristics, which does not necessarily correlate with the system level functionality. On the other hand, advanced methods include field measurements in the evaluatio...    »