Research on Wireless Fading Characteristic in Urban Bridge Environment of the Inland Waterway Based on Channel Measurement

Abstract

This paper focuses on the fading characteristics of a wireless channel of an inland waterway in an urban bridge scenario at 5.9 GHz. The measurement area was selected in Wuhan city, which lies on the middle reaches of the Yangtze River's intersection. Due to urban bridges, the fading characteristics of inland waterway channels are highly correlated with the ship motion direction or the distance between the transmitter and receiver and thus have unique properties. We demonstrated that the path loss, K-factor, power delay profile characteristics, and delay spread features significantly varied with the distance between the transmitter and receiver. Path-loss exponents were derived from the measurements and the differences between the Urban Bridge Environment and the line-of-sight was found. In bridge environments, the values of the excess delays change weakly from line-of-sight cases. The study also showed that numerical measurement results can be used to predict small-scale characteristics over any inland waterway with relatively good accuracy. These results will serve as a reference for urban waterways with bridges, as no experimental results have been reported previously.