Ultrawideband near-ground outdoor propagation channel measurements and modeling

Ultrawideband near-ground outdoor wireless communication has many envisioned applications such as outdoor wireless broadband and distributed sensor networks, but the development of any suitable communication system for this purpose requires accurate propagation channel measurement and modeling. In this paper, we present a detailed description of a measurement campaign performed in an outdoor near-ground propagation channel environment. For the measurements, we employ a multitone sounding waveform generated by an arbitrary-waveform generator, and designed to provide high Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at select evaluation frequencies. The receiver uses a sampling oscilloscope to record the receive waveform from which the channel frequency response (CFR) is obtained. We find that in particular the pathloss coefficient depends significantly on the height of transmitter and receiver, while shadowing variance and delay spread show smaller dependence. We also find a rather low dependence of the pathloss on the frequency.