CHANNEL MEASUREMENTS AND MODELLING IN A MILITARY CARGO AIRPLANE

Abstract

The results of an ultrawideband (UWB) measurement campaign carried out in a Hercules C-130 military cargo airplane are presented. The environment encompasses several metallic surfaces resulting in a large number of multipath components. Path-loss factor n representing the distance dependence of the channel path-loss is calculated for various frequency centers and bandwidths. A path- gain calculation model based on the concept of seperability of distance and frequency variables is proposed and comparison to measurements is given. Furthermore, time dispersion parameters, namely mean excess delay and root mean square (r.m.s.) delay spread are examined and their dependence on transmitter-receiver antennas separation is investigated. A power law is then employed to model the relation between the number of multipath components and the r.m.s delay spread. The temporal correlation between adjacent path amplitudes is found to be negligible. A modifled Saleh-Valenzuela model is invoked to describe the clustering of multipaths, where a difierent power decay factor is used for the rays of the flrst cluster as opposed to subsequent clusters. Moreover, the Weibull distribution models the small scale channel fading with a lognormally distributed shape parameter. The average values of this parameter imply severe fading conditions. Finally, simulation results of the proposed statistical model are compared to measured data demonstrating reasonable agreement.