Received power and ambient electric field from broadband emissions in reverberant spaces

The electromagnetic environment created in a reverberant space by broadband RF emissions is investigated. A white Gaussian noise source is used to emulate the wide power spectral density bandwidth, low temporal coherence time (rapid signal fluctuations), and large peak-to-average power ratio characteristics of emissions from modern digitally modulated spread-spectrum wireless networks. The interaction between the wide power spectral density of the noise signal and the highly frequency-selective channel of the reverberant space leads to average received power and average ambient electric field that exhibit very small spatial variation in the volume. This spatial uniformity in average field results from integration of the received signal power spectral density across the wide frequency bandwidth. The peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is derived from the time-dependent power waveform statistics of the received signal. A maximum electric field is computed from the peak received power.