Azimuth and delay dispersion of mobile radio wave propagation through vegetation

This paper reports a preliminary investigation of the influence of the foliage on the radio wave propagation in cellular scenarios. The purpose is to evaluate the dispersion caused by vegetations in mobile radio channels, hence we employed a channel sounder to measure the received signals behind dense vegetations in the rural areas in Kanagawa, Japan. In the measurement campaign the transmitter antenna is set-up in 5 different elevations (2 of which are above the vegetation height) to evaluate the foliage influence -possibly by different mechanisms- on the propagation channel. The dispersion of the direct path caused by the vegetation in delay and azimuth are investigated by deriving the first and second moments of the diffuse component distribution. For the sake of robustness to forbid the dependency to the signal model and distribution, beam-forming is used to extract these parameters.