Ultra wide band channel sounding for indoor wireless propagation environments

The recent evolution of wireless LAN (WLAN) systems has accelerated the increase in access data rate. A data rate of 1 Gb/s will be the general demand in the near future, although the indoor wireless propagation environment will become more severe than the present situation. Thus, further detailed characteristics of the indoor wireless propagation environment will be necessary for realizing gigabit transmission in WLAN systems. The authors have been developing an indoor channel sounder suitable for characterizing individual ray components due to its very fine time delay resolution of 0.5 ns. The measurement signal of the sounder occupies more than 3 GHz bandwidth, so it can be called an ultra wide band (UWB) channel sounder. The paper shows some experimental approaches for indoor radio propagation measurements by UWB channel sounding.