Statistical analysis of the UWB channel in an industrial environment

Abstract

In this paper, we present a statistical model for the ultra-wideband (UWB) channel in an industrial environment. Based on a set of measurements in a factory hall, we find that the abundance of metallic scatterers causes dense multipath scattering. This can be seen to produce mostly a Rayleigh distributed small-scale fading signal, with only a few paths exhibiting Nakagami distributions. For the power delay profile, we suggest a generalization of the Saleh-Valenzuela model where clusters with different excess delays have different ray power decay constants; the decay constants follow a linear dependence on the delay. This model provides an excellent fit to the measured data. We also note that for non-line-of-sight scenarios at larger distances, several hundred multipath components need to be collected to capture 50% of the available energy.