Measurement‐based wireless channel analysis and modelling for shipping environments

Abstract

To guarantee shipping safety, it is crucial to build a reliable wireless communication network. This study presents characteristic analysis of shipping wireless channel based on measurements. The authors conduct five channel measurements for two important water mobile communications, covering inland river and sea scenarios. Channel characteristics, e.g. power delay profile, amplitude distribution, delay spread and shadow fading, are extracted and compared for the two scenarios. It is found that the main difference between the them lies in more obstacles and scatterers in inland river propagation environment. The results show that more obstacles and scatterers can result in richer multipath effect and larger shadow fading decorrelation distance. A triple Gaussian mixture distribution (TGMD) is proposed to characterize the wireless channel with LOS, obstructed LOS and non-LOS situations in the practical propagation. To verify the effectiveness of TGMD, the goodness of fit between measurement and analysis results in terms of Rician K-factor, root mean square (RMS) delay spread and RMS Doppler spread is calculated. Furthermore, the cross-correlation among shadow fading, Rician K-factor and RMS delay spread are studied. Larger cross-correlation can be found in inland river and sea than vehicular communication due to the open propagation environment.