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Fading characteristics of maritime propagation channel for beyond geometrical horizon communications in C-band

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Abstract

The design of a maritime communication system requires the understanding of the wireless propagation channel above the sea. For broadband communication systems, a carrier frequency in the C-band is of interest because of allocatable spectrum. Therefore, the German Aerospace Center performed a long-distance channel measurement campaign at 5.2 GHz on the North sea to investigate large and small-scale fading characteristics. The results show that our measurement data conforms with the ITU-R and the Bullington’s path loss model to predict the power loss caused by diffraction over the Earth’s surface. Further, the first tap of the channel impulse response experiences Rician fading due to superposition of a strong line-of-sight (LoS) path and multipath components originating from the sea surface and ship body. We found that the fading of the second tap follows a Rician distribution, but with a much smaller K-factor compared to the first tap. The K-factor showed a dependence on the distance between the transmitter and receiver. Particularly, the K-factor of the first tap decreases significantly when the distance between the transmitter and receiver is larger than the clearance distance of the first Fresnel zone. Therefore, we propose a distance-dependent K-factor model for the first and the second tap.

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Notes

  1. Detour propagation distance is the additional propagation distance of a multipath compared to the propagation distance of the direct LoS path.

  2. Beyond the horizon, neither direct LoS path nor a reflected path does exist. Therefore, the black and the orange curves in Fig. 5 are visualized only for distance smaller than \(d_H\).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues at DLR (Armin Dammann, Uwe-Carsten Fiebig, Christian Gentner, Simon Plass, Thomas Strang, Markus Ulmschneider, Paul Unterhuber, Michael Walter, Siwei Zhang), WSV and DGzRS for their support during the channel measurement campaign, Omar Garcia Crespillo for his support on processing the GNSS data and Juan Antonio Pedreira Martos for his work on calculating Doppler using GPS measurement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Communications and Navigation, Wessling, Germany

    Wei Wang, Ronald Raulefs & Thomas Jost

Authors
  1. Wei Wang
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  2. Ronald Raulefs
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  3. Thomas Jost
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wei Wang.

Additional information

Part of this article was published at the URSI Asia-Pacific Radio Science Conference, Seoul, South Korea, August 2016 and partially presented in the Deutscher Luft- und Raumfahrtkongress (German Conference on Aerospace), Braunschweig, Germany, September 2016. The research leading to these results has been carried out under the framework of the project ‘R&D for the maritime safety and security and corresponding real-time services’. The project started in January 2013 and is led by the Program Coordination Defence and Security Research within the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

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Wang, W., Raulefs, R. & Jost, T. Fading characteristics of maritime propagation channel for beyond geometrical horizon communications in C-band. CEAS Space J 11, 95–104 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-017-0185-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-017-0185-1

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