Ray Tracing-Based Maritime Channel Analysis for Millimeter Radiowaves

Abstract

In this work, we present and analyze the simulation results of millimeter-wave propagation channel performed over the sea surface for ship to ship scenario. We present a channel characterization study where channel parameters such as path loss, received power, root mean square delay spread, and power delay profile are inspected by taking the ray tracing advantages of the “Wireless InSite” software. 35 GHz and 94 GHz are the bands of interest, as they have minimum water and oxygen attenuation and their performances in practice would be the best among the other frequency bands. In our study, we investigate the effect of ray spacing, Earth’s curvature, and the sea surface roughness on marine channel characteristics. Our results demonstrate that 2-ray analytical model should be only used for some short ranges over the sea surface propagating at high frequencies. Besides, free-space path loss model cannot predict the behavior of channel over the sea surface in high frequencies even for the short ranges. Therefore, a new path loss model is proposed to compensate the defects of existing path loss models by the means of changing the reflection coefficient and modifying the original 2-ray path loss model. This proposed model is able to better follow the simulated or measured propagation loss with less error, when it is compared with Free Space and 2-ray path loss models. Hence, this new model can be used for the path loss calculations at the mentioned frequencies especially for large distances between transmitter and receiver.