Bistatic RCS measurements of aircraft seat rows and their implementation in a raytracer

With the increasing establishment of wireless applications, such as GSM, UWB or WLAN, on board aircraft, trains or large coaches there is always the need for performance prediction of actual propagation channels. Since such environments are electrically very large, propagation simulations are usually done with raytracing tools. Basically, the approximations implied by a raytracer face difficulties for individual small scatterers, such as parts of a seat row not having the size of several wavelengths. Based on bistatic radar cross section measurements this paper proposes an easy method to represent complex composite structures of different probably unknown material parameters, like seat rows in an aircraft, with a geometrically simple substitute. This substitute structure is on the one hand easy to implement and on the other hand compatible to raytracer simulation techniques. RCS measurements are assessed with reference scatterers, such as a sphere and a metallic plate. Finally, the post processing to the substitute structure is validated with raytracer simulations.