Abstract

Abstract—The new multichannel/multicarrier technologies can potentially support much higher data rates in mobile multiple-access environments, such as carrier aggregation (CA) defined in the fourth-generation Long-Term Evolution Advanced enhance-ment. The correlation properties of noncontiguous subchannels are critical for the performance of CA, including cell coverage, frequency diversity, and channel state estimation. This paper has studied the correlation of the large-scale fading (LSF) and small-scale fading (SSF) of arbitrarily separated subchannels by realistic channel measurement and analytical modeling. We first obtain the subchannel correlation from the ultrawideband (UWB) channel measurement. This new approach avoids probing multiple subchannels simultaneously with channel sounders, which would be prohibitively complicated. The cross correlation of two distinct subchannels and the autocorrelation of a single subchannel are