Other Channels

Abstract

With the fast development of Internet of Things in the 5G era, it has been attracting increasing research attention to provide broadband wireless data coverage in the remote rural and maritime areas. Owing to the geographical limitation of available base station (BS) sites in these tough scenarios, various transmission platforms, e.g. elevated terrestrial BSs, unmanned aerial vehicles, and satellites, should be exploited collaboratively, so as to form a three‐dimensional layered cellular network. Intuitively, different transmission platforms may correspond to quite different wireless channel models because of their different heights, as well as different propagation environments. This renders it challenging to elaborately establish an efficient remote rural/maritime network. In this article, we provide a survey on the remote rural/maritime channel models, aiming to support practical network designs, and offer a comprehensive reference for practitioners. Particularly, we discuss typical transmission scenarios for the remote rural/maritime coverage, the possible frequency bands, and more importantly, the available path loss and small‐scale fading models for the wireless channels. Different from conventional urban/suburban scenarios, we also briefly discuss potential approaches to exploit the unique characteristic of remote rural/maritime wireless channels.