Effect of Human Presence on UWB Radiowave Propagation Within the Passenger Cabin of a Midsize Airliner

We have characterized the effect of human presence on path gain and time dispersion over ultrawideband (UWB) channels within the passenger cabin of a typical midsize airliner. We measured a few hundred channel frequency responses over the range 3.1-6.1 GHz between various locations within a Boeing 737-200 aircraft, with and without volunteers occupying the passenger seats. The links were deployed in a point-to-multipoint configuration with the transmitting antenna along the centre-line of the forward part of the cabin at either the ceiling or headrest level and the receiving antenna at the headrest or armrest level at selected locations throughout the rest of the cabin. As the density of occupancy increased from empty to full, path gain dropped by no more than a few dB on the ceiling-to-headrest paths but dropped by up to 10 dB on the ceiling-to-armrest and headrest-to-armrest paths. The gain reduction reached its maximum at the mid-point of the cabin and decreased thereafter. In all cases, increasing the density of occupancy caused the distance dependence of the rms delay spread to decrease greatly, the decay rate of the scattered components in the power delay profile (PDP) to almost double and the number of significant paths to drop by almost half. The results suggest that human presence substantially affects both path gain and time dispersion within the aircraft and should therefore be considered when assessing the performance of in-cabin wireless systems.