Standardized Approach for Assessing Wireless IoT Devices in Millimeter-Wave Industrial Work-Cell Channels

In this paper, we present a standardized, repeatable test approach that replicates key features of measured industrial environments in a fully-characterized hybrid test chamber. The hybrid chamber consists of an anechoic chamber along with movable metallic spheres that provide discrete reconfigurable multipath components. The chamber is characterized by a synthetic-aperture system providing a reference measurement that captures the non-idealities of the chamber along with the intended spatial multipath, completing characterization of the test environment. A key feature of our approach is the propagation of correlated uncertainties through to the final system response – including uncertainties specific to synthetic apertures such as cable bending due to scanning and inexact positioner locations. The uncertainty analysis provides statistically accurate knowledge of the environment, allowing separation of measurement errors from errors related to the device or system under test. We have also extracted three exemplar channels that capture key features of a work-cell-sized industrial environment from measurements made with the same synthetic aperture.