Abstract

Passive channel sounding in live cellular network, where downlink signals of in-service base stations (BSs) are acquired to extract multipath propagation parameters, has attracted great interest from academia and industry in recent years. In this work, downlink signals of live 5G new radio (NR) multi-cell BSs were measured with a recent home-developed multi-antenna passive channel sounder. It was found out that the performance of multipath parameter extraction algorithm is severely affected by the existence of many interfering neighbor cells (which share the same frequency band as the serving cell) in the multi-cell measurements. For this reason, a novel algorithm based on the interference cancellation principle is proposed, which can effectively mitigate the impact of multicell interference and thus improve the parameter extraction performance. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm is finally demonstrated by the passive channel sounding campaigns in live 5G NR multi-cell cellular network.