2 - The wireless channel

Summary

A good understanding of the wireless channel, its key physical parameters and the modeling issues, lays the foundation for the rest of the book. This is the goal of this chapter.

A defining characteristic of the mobile wireless channel is the variations of the channel strength over time and over frequency. The variations can be roughly divided into two types (Figure 2.1):

• Large-scale fading, due to path loss of signal as a function of distance and shadowing by large objects such as buildings and hills. This occurs as the mobile moves through a distance of the order of the cell size, and is typically frequency independent.

• Small-scale fading, due to the constructive and destructive interference of the multiple signal paths between the transmitter and receiver. This occurs at the spatial scale of the order of the carrier wavelength, and is frequency dependent.

We will talk about both types of fading in this chapter, but with more emphasis on the latter. Large-scale fading is more relevant to issues such as cell-site planning. Small-scale multipath fading is more relevant to the design of reliable and efficient communication systems – the focus of this book.

We start with the physical modeling of the wireless channel in terms of electromagnetic waves. We then derive an input/output linear time-varying model for the channel, and define some important physical parameters. Finally, we introduce a few statistical models of the channel variation over time and over frequency.