  A novel beam domain channel model (BDCM) for massive multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems has been proposed in this paper.
The near-field effect and spherical wavefront are firstly assumed in the
proposed model, which is different from the conventional BDCM for MIMO based on
the far-field effect and plane wavefront assumption. The proposed novel BDCM is
the transformation of an existing geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) from
the antenna domain into beam domain. The space-time non-stationarity is also
modeled in the novel BDCM. Moreover, the comparison of computational complexity
for both models is studied. Based on the numerical analysis, comparison of
cluster-level statistical properties between the proposed BDCM and existing
GBSM has shown that there exists little difference in the space, time, and
frequency correlation properties for two models. Also, based on the simulation,
coherence bandwidths of the two models in different scenarios are almost the
same. The computational complexity of the novel BDCM is much lower than the
existing GBSM. It can be observed that the proposed novel BDCM has similar
statistical properties to the existing GBSM at the clusterlevel. The proposed
BDCM has less complexity and is therefore more convenient for information
theory and signal processing research than the conventional GBSMs.
