Measurements and Analysis of Maritime Wireless Channel at 8 GHz in the South China Sea Region

Abstract

This article presents the measurement results of maritime wireless propagation channel at 8 GHz in the South China Sea (SCS) region. Large-scale path loss (PL) and small-scale fading of channels between a marine observation platform and a moving vessel are investigated. For large-scale PL, comparisons are conducted among the free space model, the two-ray model, the parabolic equation model (PEM), and the log-distance model with the measured PL data. The results show that the log-distance model agrees well with the general trend of the measured data, whereas the PEM has a better ability to capture the variations of the interference nulls. In addition, the free space model and the two-ray model have larger deviation from the empirical data, implying that they are not suitable for the desired scenario. For small-scale fading, various distributions are considered to fit the fading. Based on the criteria of Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistics, the Rician distribution has the best goodness of fit, compared with the Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, Welbull, or lognormal distributions. These research can provide good guidance for efficient designing and future deployments of distributed buoy networks (DBNs) in the SCS region.