Experimental Characterization of Microwave Radio Propagation in ICT Equipment for Wireless Harness Communications

The wireless harness is a new emerging short-range communication to replace wire harness implemented in devices with wireless communications between internal components. In such an in-device wireless harness, the communication distance is up to a couple of meters at most. Through the challenge to apply this wireless communication technology to information and communication technology (ICT) equipment, we found that the radio channel inside the ICT equipment deeply depends on its internal structure more than we expected. In order to understand the radio propagation characteristics inside such equipment, we propose a new modeling technique with using a frequency- dependent path loss exponent expressing the near- and far-field propagation, which enables us to successfully extract attenuation factors for the frequency and the propagation distance from the measured data. The results shows the path loss characteristics can be divided into three regions; line-of-sight (LOS), non-line-of-sight (NLOS), and a transition range. The transition range, which appears between the LOS and the NLOS, is caused by a blocking due to the densely-packaged internal components. These findings and equations can be criteria to design a wireless harness communication link.