TABLE OF CONTENTS For the development, simulation, and testing of any wireless systems, it is necessary to know the wireless propagation channel between the transmitter and receiver. The amount of information required for a sufficient description of the channel depends on the system that is analysed. While for narrowband systems a characterisation of the channel attenuation was sufficient, wideband systems require the characterisation of the delay dispersion (impulse response), and smart antennas require directional information of the incident radiation at one link end, usually the BS. For all of these cases, previous COST Actions have made important contributions that are in worldwide use now: COST 231 extended the well-known Okumura-Hata model for the channel attenuation to frequency ranges and environments of interest to modern cellular systems; COST 207 derived models for the delay dispersion in cellular macrocells; these models were instrumental for the development of the GSM system. COST 259 finally derived a model for the directional characteristics in macro-, micro- and picocells, and merged this approach with a description of the attenuation and delay dispersion that is more general than the previous models.
Despite these important advances, there was a lack of accepted channel models for MIMO systems. While the 3GPP standardisation effort derived a model that is now being used for the selection of MIMO approaches in third-generation cellular systems, the description is limited to a small number of environments that is of most interest for cellular communications, but leaves out the...
