MIMO-TDD Reciprocity under Hardware Imbalances: Experimental Results

For time division duplexing (TDD) systems, the physical channel in the air is reciprocal for uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) within the channel coherence time. However when the transceivers radio frequency (RF) hardware is taken into consideration, TDD channel reciprocity no longer holds because of the non-symmetric characteristics of RF transmit and receive chains. Relative calibration has been proposed to compensate this hardware impairment with a multiplicative matrix. In this paper we perform hardware measurements on this calibration matrix which gives a direct insight on the physical phenomenon of TDD transceivers. Especially, we inspect the assumption that this calibration matrix is diagonal, which is widely adopted in literature but has never been verified by experiments. This work can be regarded as an experimental base for TDD calibration or for theoretical analysis of non-perfect channel reciprocity of TDD systems.