CHAPTER 7 POLARIZATION-SENSITIVE MULTIPATH PROPAGATION MODELING.pdfVIP

126 CHAPTER 7 POLARIZATION-SENSITIVE MULTIPATH PROPAGATION MODELING 7.1 Introduction A variety of propagation models have been reported in the literature that approximate characteristics of a radio channel, including path loss, shadowing, and multipath effects. These models provide some insight into the effects of different channel characteristics on wireless communication systems. Models can be used for preliminary evaluation of system alternatives before investing in prototype hardware. Current propagation models do not consider the polarization of transmitted signal, depolarization introduced by the channel, or polarized multipath. Propagation models that include polarization effects will be useful for evaluating the performance of polarization-sensitive adaptive arrays and diversity reception techniques. While polarization-sensitive adaptive arrays have been proposed as described in Chapter 5, their performance has not been evaluated in multipath channels. In this chapter, existing multipath propagation models are extended to include the effects of antenna pattern, antenna orientation, and wave polarization. 7.2 Existing Multipath Propagation Models Many multipath propagation models have been developed for evaluating antenna diversity and adaptive array systems. Several of these models are summarized in [7.1]. These models typically assume there are a number of objects that cause scattering or specular reflections (for brevity both of these will be referred to as “scatterers”) in the vicinity of the transmitter and/or receiver. The signal at the receiver consists of signals reflected or scattered from objects, and possibly also a line-of-sight component. These models generate several multipath components, each having distinct amplitude, phase, and angle of arrival at each receiving antenna. The models yield a vector containing the resultant signal at each antenna due to all the multipath components. Because of this, these models are sometimes called vec