A Measurement-Based Statistical Model for Industrial Ultra-Wideband Channels

The results of three ultra-wideband (UWB) measurement campaigns conducted in two different industrial environments are presented. A frequency range of 3.1-10.6 or 3.1-5.5 GHz was measured using a vector network analyzer and a virtual array technique enabling the investigation of small-scale statistics. The results show that the energy arrives in clusters, and that the abundance of metallic scatterers present in the factory hall causes dense multipath scattering. The latter produces a small-scale fading that is mostly Rayleigh distributed; the only exception being the delay bin containing the line-of- sight component. The power delay profile can be modeled by a generalized Saleh-Valenzuela model, where different clusters have different ray power decay constants. It is also noted that the number of multipath components required to capture a majority of the energy is quite large. More than a hundred components can be needed to capture 50% of the total available energy.