On measurement uncertainty introduced by instruments in frequency domain channel measurement systems

Measurement uncertainty provides a quantitative reference to choose appropriate instruments and measurement methods. This paper focuses on the measurement uncertainty introduced by measurement instruments in frequency domain channel measurement systems. For frequency domain channel measurement, the measurement instrument, Vector Network Analyzer, need to be calibrated before measurement. The uncertainty analysis for various calibration methods is the foundation to make a judicious choice of calibration methods. The uncertainty analysis is based on Monte Carlo method with considering the correlations between S-parameter measurements at different frequencies. This paper illustrates the method of uncertainty analysis and takes the path loss measurement for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) channel as an example. The experiments in this paper show that the correlations have a strong influence on the uncertainties of path loss measurements. The uncertainties for different calibration methods are calculated out. Based on the uncertainty analysis, the “response” calibration is suggested for channel measurements.