Radio Propagation and Adaptive Antennas for Wireless Communication Networks, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER TENMultipath Fading Phenomena in Terrestrial Wireless Communication Links

For all cellular radio communication networks, land, atmospheric, and ionospheric, the process of transmitting information must be accompanied by the knowledge of parameters of both the transmitting and receiving terminal antennas at the ends of the radio link. It is also important to have some knowledge of the statistical parameters of the channel and their correlations in the space, time, and frequency domains, in order to evaluate the performance of the radio system considered. As was mentioned in Chapter 1, the important statistical characteristics that must be predicted is the path loss, slow, and fast fading, which allow radio network designers to predict strict link budgets, and to obtain the full radio coverage of areas of service, that is, to create radio maps of service areas.

In order to avoid measuring channel statistics for all operating environments and networks designs, we proposed in Chapters 5 and 8 a unified stochastic approach for multipath radio channel description based on real physical phenomena, such as multiple reflections, diffraction, and scattering from various nontransparent obstructions (trees, hills, houses, and buildings) located in the terrain. All of them produced the relevant effects when compared to measurements reported in the literature for specific rural, forested, mixed residential, suburban, and urban environments.

In Section 10.1, we compare the results of theoretical ...