  It is common practice in wireless communications to assume strict or
wide-sense stationarity of the wireless channel in time and frequency. While
this approximation has some physical justification, it is only valid inside
certain time-frequency regions. This paper presents an elaborate
characterization of the non-stationarity of wireless dual-polarized channels in
time. The evaluation is based on urban macrocell measurements performed at 2.53
GHz. In order to define local quasi-stationarity (LQS) regions, i.e., regions
in which the change of certain channel statistics is deemed insignificant, we
resort to the performance degradation of selected algorithms specific to
channel estimation and beamforming. Additionally, we compare our results to
commonly used measures in the literature. We find that the polarization, the
antenna spacing, and the opening angle of the antennas into the propagation
channel can strongly influence the non-stationarity of the observed channel.
The obtained LQS regions can be of significant size, i.e., several meters, and
thus the reuse of channel statistics over large distances is meaningful (in an
average sense) for certain algorithms. Furthermore, we conclude that, from a
system perspective, a proper non-stationarity analysis should be based on the
considered algorithm.
