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A Transmit and Receive Multi-Antenna Channel Model and Simulator for Communications from High Altitude Platforms

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Abstract

The interest of the scientific and industrial communities on the application of high altitude stratospheric platforms to communications is increasingly growing. Several research projects and field trials are being carried out by international consortia and specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum have been allocated by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for communications applications. The channel experienced by such systems plays a key role for the provision of reliable communications services but, unfortunately, its inherent characteristics are substantially different from those of other channel typologies. Therefore, in order to design and simulate effective propagation impairment mitigation techniques such as adaptive modulation and coding or adaptive beamforming and equalization algorithms, an ad hoc channel model and simulator is definitively required. In this paper a novel channel model and a related channel simulator especially tailored for HAP-based communication systems are presented. The model is conceived for link-level simulations of point-to-point communication links, wherein both the transmitter and the receiver may be equipped with an array of antennas. Peculiar physical effects of the stratospheric channel are taken into account as well as impairments due to the possible presence of scatterers and relative movement of both transmitting and receiving stations. The structure of the channel simulator has been conceived to maintain the computational burden at required by the channel simulator is kept low by an efficient tapped delay line implementation.

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Notes

  1. The array steering vector is defined as [32]

    $$ {\bf a}({\varvec{\xi}})\mathop{=}\limits^{\Delta}[\exp(j2\pi f_0{\user1{T}}_0({\varvec{\xi}})),\exp(j2\pi f_0{\user1{T}}_1({\varvec{\xi}})), \ldots, \exp(j2\pi f_0{\user1{T}}_{N-1}({\varvec{\xi}}))]^{\user1{T}}, $$

    where f 0 is the carrier frequency, and \({\user1{T}}_{n}({\varvec{\xi}})\), \(\forall n=0,1,\ldots, N-1\), is the time taken by the signal to fly from the nth sensor to the origin of coordinate reference frame.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino (TO), Italy

    Emanuela Falletti & Fabrizio Sellone

  2. Department of Electronics, The University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK

    Candida Spillard & David Grace

Authors
  1. Emanuela Falletti
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  2. Fabrizio Sellone
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  3. Candida Spillard
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  4. David Grace
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Correspondence to Emanuela Falletti.

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Falletti, E., Sellone, F., Spillard, C. et al. A Transmit and Receive Multi-Antenna Channel Model and Simulator for Communications from High Altitude Platforms. Int J Wireless Inf Networks 13, 59–75 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-005-0017-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-005-0017-7

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