Measuring the Time-Varying Channel Characteristics of the Plasma Sheath From the Reflected Signal

Abstract

Due to high attenuation and large path loss, it is usually very difficult to measure the channel characteristics of the plasma sheath from the received signal. This paper proposes a novel method to measure them from the reflected signal. Using the finite-difference time-domain algorithm, electron density variation of the plasma sheath and its impact on the transmitted and reflected signals are investigated numerically. High correlations between these two signals are observed from both amplitude and phase, which enables us to online estimate one signal from the other for channel measurement and channel modeling conveniently. This would be very useful to further develop some channel adaptive communication techniques for alleviating the radio blackout problem.