Propagation measurements at a G.M. manufacturing plant for wireless LAN communication

The quest for a robust, reliable open standard for wireless communication which would support manufacturing applications, required a thorough understanding of the channel characteristics. At the time this work was undertaken (summer 1989), relatively little literature on factory environments existed. In addition the published tests recorded received power and did not measure the phase, but assumed that it was randomly distributed. The test at G.M. measured both amplitude and phase to provide the complete impulse response. Given this impulse response, it is possible to evaluate the performance of any type of bandwidth limited modulation in this channel. This paper presents the measurement techniques, the results and a brief analysis of: instantaneous and average power; large scale fading characteristics; delay spread characteristics; temporal variance of the channel; analysis of noise samples; analysis of the impact of impulse noise on barker sequence correlation peaks