Empirical analyses on maritime radio propagation

Abstract

Empirical analyses, based on extensive measurements results, were performed to characterize maritime radio propagation at GSM1800 frequency band. As the height of sea waves increased, it blocks more of the Fresnel zones below the line-of-sight path. It is of interest therefore to examine the overall statistics of the received signal in rough sea surface conditions. The overall statistics of received signal was found to be properly represented by a mixture of the Rician and log-normal distributions with varying Rician factor and standard deviation. From our observations, a coherent reflection component is voluntarily imposed over incoherent components, resulting in a large value of Rician factor, especially under small sea wave height or calm sea condition. Fading depth and intensity were also evaluated. The BER performances corresponding to these sea surface profiles were analyzed by computer simulation. © 2004 IEEE.