An Overview of Modeling of Ultra Wide Band Indoor Channels

Z. Irahhauten, H. Nikookar and G. Janssen Center for Wireless Personal Communications (CWPC) Department of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science-Delft University of Technology Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands Phone:+31-15-278 13 89, Fax: +31-15-278 40 46 Email: {Z.Irahhauten, H.Nikookar, G.Janssen}@EWI.tudelft.nl

Abstract In this paper an overview of the reported parameters of the Ultra Wide Band (UWB) indoor wireless channel is presented. First, an introduction to UWB technology as well as UWB wireless channels is provided. Then, impulse response model for the wireless indoor channel is introduced. The available UWB channel measurements results in indoor environments are consulted and accordingly, the major UWB channel parameters are presented and compared to those of conventional narrowband (i.e. narrowband as well as wide-band) systems (CNS). The novelty of this work is related to gathering different UWB wireless channel parameters, analysis and comparison, leading to a conclusion on modeling of impulse radio channel.

random behaviour of the UWB wireless channel at any time and for different propagation environments using a statistical approach. The structure of the paper is as follows. In section II the impulse response model of UWB channel is introduced, and relevant channel parameters are presented based on the results of UWB measurements reported in the literature. Comprehensive comparison and analysis of those channel parameters of UWB and CNS is given in section III. Concluding remarks appear in section IV. II. UWB MEASUREMENTS AND MODELS The UWB wireless channel can be fully described by its time-variant impulse response function h(t, ), which can be expressed as follows:
N

I. I NTRODUCTION The world is now in a stage of major telecommunications revolutions. The need for multimedia communications and new exible communication capabilities with high data rates and high Quality of Service (QoS) requirements become increasingly important. To fulll these demands, advanced research is needed in the eld of communications. New wireless communication systems based on UWB technology have been introduced recently. The Federal Communication Commissions (FCC) recognized the signicance of UWB technology in 1998 and initiated the regulatory review process of the technology. Consequently, FCC authorized the UWB technology for commercial uses with different applications, different operating frequency bands as well as the transmitted power spectral densities. Generally, UWB communications is based on the transmission of very short pulses with relatively low radio energy. It has been in use for military applications and it may see increased use in the future for wireless communications and ranging according to its ne time resolution and its material penetration capability. UWB radio signals occupy a bandwidth more than the 25% of the center frequency [1]. This large bandwidth allows a very high capacity and accordingly, high processing gains that allow access of large number of users to the system. Meanwhile, since UWB can be a carrierless (i.e. baseband) radio technology, it requires no mixer. Therefore, the implementation of a such system can be made simple, which means that low cost transmitters/receivers can be achieved when compared to the conventional radio frequency (RF) carrier systems. Several ways exist to build a model of the mobile radio propagation channel. One major way, which is concentrated in this paper, is to use stochastic methods, which describe the

h(t, ) =
n=1

an (t)(t n (t))ejn (t)

(1)

where is the delay, t refers to the impulse response at instant t and is the Dirac delta function. The parameters of the nth path an , n , n and N are amplitude, delay, phase and number of multipath components, respectively. When UWB is a baseband signal, the phase in equation 1 can be kept out of consideration. The recent results of UWB measurements and channel modeling can be found in [2][9]. In the following, important models for UWB channel parameters are discussed.

Power delay prole The average received power as function of the excess delay is called Power Delay Prole (PDP). UWB measurements performed in an ofce building show that the PDP is an exponential decreasing function with the delay [2], [3]. The Time Decay Constant (TDC) seems to follow a Lognormal distribution with mean of 39.8 ns and standard deviation of 1.2 dB in an ofce building [2]. Moreover, the reported results in [2], shows that the mean TDC is 29 35 ns and 41 56 ns for LOS and NLOS, respectively. However, the same author of [2], introduced another model refers to double exponential model based on clustering to characterize the PDP in UWB channel [4] and the corresponding parameters are shown in Table I. Furthermore, the reported results of [9] show that double exponential decay model seems

to match the UWB channel measurements for LOS as well as NLOS propagation. The UWB measurements performed in corridor show also that cluster phenomenon can be observed [5].

distribution of path amplitudes is computed using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test with 1% signicance level, and the results show that Lognormal distribution gives the best t when compared to the Rayleigh distribution for both LOS and NLOS cases.

Arrival times The arrival times of the multipath components for UWB seem to follow a negative exponential distribution and the arrival rate of the multipath components is found to be 1/(2.3 ns) [4]. The number of multipath components arriving during an interval of maximum excess delay Tmax is equal to N = .Tmax with is the mean arrival rate of multipath components. This parameter is carefully investigated for different bin resolutions [10]. The number of multipath increases when the resolution increases. The distribution of the number of path is also examined and Rayleigh distribution gives the best t with standard deviation of = 7 and = 30 paths for LOS and NLOS, respectively [10]. RMS delay spread The rms delay spread (RDS) parameter is a good measure of multipath spread because it determines the frequency selectively of the channel fading, which degrades the performance of digital communication systems over radio channels [11]. The RDS limits the maximum data transmission rate, which can reliably supported by the channel. In the case without using of diversity or equalization, the RDS is inversely proportional to the maximum usable data rate of the channel [12]. The RDS is dened as: rms = 2 ( )2 (2)

Correlation Wireless communication systems usually suffer form multipath fading caused by propagation mechanisms such reection, diffraction and scattering due to the obstacles in the channel. To combat this problem, techniques like diversity are used. This technique is more efcient in the case where the received signals are independent, but if the received signals are correlated, this leads to a limitation of the performance of the system [13]. Two types of correlation can be distinguished in the wireless channel, temporal and spatial correlation. The former means the correlation between multipath components arriving at the same prole but at different delays. The last means the correlation between multipath component collected at different prole but at the same delay [14]. The temporal correlation is investigated in [2] between powers of the multipath components and the results show that the correlation coefcient does not exceed 0.2 for UWB. The spatial correlation of UWB signals is investigated in [15]. The results show that the higher the separation distance, the lower the spatial correlation and the correlation is higher for LOS than NLOS propagation. Path loss For developing a good UWB communication system, a radio designer must know the path loss (PL) in order to determine the coverage area of the system. Path loss is dened as the ratio of the transmit signal power to the receive signal power [16]. Based on the UWB measurements in [2], the path loss exponent and the standard deviation of shadowing are 2.4 and 5.9 dB, respectively, and the best model for the shadowing is the Lognormal distribution. Different values for the path loss exponent are reported in [6] as 1.7 and 3.5 as well as for the standard deviation of shadowing as 1.6 dB and 2.7 dB for LOS and NLOS, respectively. According to [10], the path loss exponent and the standard deviation of the shadowing for LOS are 1.7 and 1.5 respectively, and for NLOS are 4.1 and 3.6, respectively. The relation between RDS and path loss is investigated in [6], [8]. The results show that the higher the RDS, the higher the PL. III. C OMPARISON AND ANALYSIS

where and 2 are the rst and the second moments of the power delay prole respectively, and are dened as: =
n a2 n / n n

a2 = n
n

P (n )n / n

Pn (n )

(3) where an , Pn , and n are amplitude, power and delay, respectively. The results of UWB measurements show that RDS follows a Normal distribution with mean = 4.7 ns and = 8.2 ns and standard deviation = 2.3 and = 3.3 for LOS and NLOS, respectively [6]. However, different statistics of RDS found in [3] show mean = 812 ns and = 1419 ns and standard deviation = 0.3 1 and = 1 5 for LOS and NLOS cases, respectively. In [10], RDS values of respectively, 9 ns and 11.5 ns for LOS and NLOS are reported.

Fading A radio designer should know the fading margin, which needs to be taken into account in the selection of transmit power. The fading margin in UWB is found to be 5 dB [7] and the same result is found in [10]. The measurement results reported in [5] show that the fading can be modeled by a Rice distribution with Rice factor of 9 dB. The results of [4] show that fading follows a Rayleigh distribution. However, in [2] the Gamma distribution is reported to give the best t for the amplitude distribution. In [9], the empirical

The PDP in UWB decreases exponentially with the delay because later paths experience more attenuation, and also the possibility of reection. Due to strong reectors situating in the channel, the PDP can follow a double exponential function. The same model is found for CNS [17], [18] (see Table I). According to Table I, the arrival rate of multipath components is remarkably higher for UWB than for CNS. This is due to the high time resolution in UWB, which means that more distinct paths can be detected as illustrated in Figure 1 where BW refers to the bandwidth.

Received signal
Parameter
TDC of clusters (ns) TDC within cluster (ns)

UWB
Win Model [4] Intel Model [9] Saleh Valenzuela [17]

CNS
Spencer et. al [18] Building 1 Building 2

27.9 84.1 1/45.5 1/2.30

16 1.6 1/60 1/0.5

60 20 1/300 1/5

33.6 28.6 16.8 5.10

78 82.2 17.3 6.60

excess delay 1/BWUWB 1/BWCNS

Cluster arrival rate (ns -1) Intracluster arrival rate (ns -1)

TABLE I Fig. 1. Illustration of the bandwidth (i.e. resolution) effect on the detection of multipath components. PDP
DOUBLE EXPONENTIAL MODEL FOR THE

UWB AND THE CNS.

The statistics of RDS for UWB seem to be smaller to those of CNS reported in [14]. This is due smaller maximum excess delay as well as smaller TDC of the clusters in the UWB case. The fading margin is much smaller in UWB than the fading margin of CNS, which is about 25 dB. This is because a large number of received pulses do not interfere with each other due to the large bandwidth occupied by UWB signals (see Figure 1). The condition for destructive interference between pulses in indoor propagation environment can be found in [19]. The reported Rice factor is remarkably small, and consequently, the Rice distribution converges to the Rayleigh distribution. However, since the number of multipath components arriving at a same delay (i.e. same bin) is remarkably small for UWB, the vector summation of the signals at that same delay gives less amplitude uctuations, and the modeling of the fading with the Rayleigh distribution seems inappropriate. Therefore, some distribution functions are introduced to characterize the small-scale rapid fading variations in UWB indoor environments such as POCA (POlydorou-CApsalis) [20] and NAZU (Nakagawa-AritaZhang-Udagawa) [21] for the case of NLOS and LOS, respectively. Different reported path loss exponents are perhaps due to different types of the environments in where the measurements are performed. Additionally, the Lognormally distributed standard deviations of shadowing are smaller for UWB when compared to those of CNS, which are found 3 12 dB [22]. This can explained by the fact that UWB has a large bandwidth, which allows high capability of penetration trough the walls. A comparison of main UWB and CNS channel parameters are summarized in Table II. IV. CONCLUSION An overview of the reported UWB measurement results and channel modeling for indoor propagation environments in the literature was given. The UWB indoor wireless channel can be described by the impulse response model. The reported results show that the received UWB signal power decreases exponentially with the excess delay. The double exponential model can also be used to describe the PDP. The time decay constant depends on the type of the environments. The arrival times of the multipath components are negative exponentially distributed. The arrival rate of multipath components is higher for UWB than CNS due to high time resolution. The reported results indicate a limited correlation between powers

Channel parameter
LOS RDS NLOS Fading distribution Path loss exponent Std. of Shadowing (Lognormal) LOS NLOS LOS NLOS LOS NLOS

UWB
4-12 (ns) 8-19 (ns) Gamma / NaZu Gamma / PoCa 1.5-2 2.4- 4 1.1-2.1dB 2-5.9 dB 5 dB 0.2 Rayleigh Exponential

CNS
10-100 (ns) up to 200 (ns) Rice Rayleigh 1-3 2.1-6 3-6 dB 6-12 dB 25 dB 0.2-0.4 Poisson Exponential

Fading margin Temporal correlation Number of paths distribution Arrival times distribution

TABLE II C OMPARISON OF THE PROPOSED CHANNEL PARAMETER IN THE LITERATURE FOR UWB AND CNS.

of multipath components at the same prole. UWB signal are more robust against fading than CNS and the fading can be modelled by the Gamma distribution. The RDS seems to follow a Normal distribution, and its statistics are higher for the case of NLOS. The RDS values are smaller for the UWB than the CNS. The path loss increases with the distance. The path loss exponent as well as the shadowing standard deviation depends on the propagation medium, and they are smaller for the UWB. R EFERENCES
[1] K. Siwiak, Ultra-Wide Band Radio: A New PAN and Positioning Technology, IEEE Vehicu. Technol. Soc. News, pp. 49, Feb. 2002. [2] D. Cassioli, M.Z. Win and A.R. Molisch, A Statistical Model for the UWB Indoor Channel, IEEE VTC Spring 53rd, vol. 2, pp. 11591163, Oct. 2001. [3] J. Keignart and N. Daniele, Subnanosecond UWB Channel Sounding in Frequency and Temporal Domain, Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies, Digest of Papers. IEEE Conference on, pp. 2530, 2002. [4] R.J.M. Cramer, R.A. Scholtz and M.Z Win, Evaluation of an UltraWide-Band Propagation Channel, Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 50, no. 5, pp. 561570, May 2002. [5] J. Kunisch and J. Pamp, Measurement Results and Modeling Aspects for the UWB Radio Channel, Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies, Digest of Papers. IEEE Conference on, pp. 1924, 2002.

[6] S.S Ghassemizadeh, R. Jana V. Tarokh, C.W Rice and W. Turin, A Statistical Path Loss Model for In-home UWB Channels, Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies, Digest of Papers. IEEE Conference on, pp. 5964, 2002. [7] M.Z Win and R.A. Scholtz, On the Robustness of Ultra-Wide Bandwidth Signals in Dense Multipath Environments, IEEE Communications Letters, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 5153, Feb. 1998. [8] S. Yano, Investigating the Ultra-wideband Indoor Wireless Channel, Conference IEEE VTC Spring, vol. 3, no. 55, pp. 12001204, 2002. [9] J. Foerster and Q. Li, UWB Channel Modeling Contribution from Intel, Report, Jun. 2002. [10] L. Rusch, C. Prettie, D. Cheung, Q. Li and M. Ho, Characterization of UWB Propagation from 2 to 8 GHz in a Residential Environment, Article availble at www.intel.com, 2003. [11] A. Molisch, Statistical Properties of The RMS Delay Spread of Mobile Radio Channels with Independent Rayleigh-Fading Paths, IEEE Trans. Vehicu. Technol., vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 201204, Feb. 1996. [12] G. Janssen, P. Stigter and R. Prasad, Wideband Indoor Channel Measurements and BER Analysis of Frequency Selective Multipath Channels at 2.4 GHz, 4.75 GHz and 11.5 GHz, IEEE Trans. Vehicu. Technol., vol. 44, no. 10, pp. 12721288, Oct. 1996. [13] J.N. Pierce and S. Stein, Multiple Diversity with Nonindependent Fading, Proc. IRE, vol. 48, pp. 89104, Jan. 1960. [14] H. Hashemi, The Indoor Radio Propagation Channel, Proc. of IEEE, vol. 81, no. 7, pp. 943968, Jul. 1993. [15] C. Prettie, D. Cheung, L. Rusch, M. Ho, Spatial Correlation of UWB Signals in a Home Environment, IEEE Conference on Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies, pp. 6569, May 2002. [16] L.W. Couch II, Digital and Analog Communication Systems. PrenticeHall International, 1997. [17] A.A.M. Saleh and R.A. Valenzuela, A Statistical Model for Indoor Multipath Propagation, IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun., vol. 5, pp. 128137, Feb. 1987. [18] B. J. Q. Spencer, M. Rice and M. Jensen, A Statistical Model for Angle of Arrival in Indoor Multipath Propagation, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, vol. 3, no. 47, pp. 14151429, May 1997. [19] K. Siwiak and A. Petroff, A Path Link Model for Ultra Wide Band Pulse Transmissions, IEEE VTS Spring Vehic. Tech. Conf., vol. 2, no. 53, pp. 11731175, 2001. [20] D. S. Polydorou and C. N. Capsalis, A New Theoretical Model for the Prediction of Rapid Fading Variations in an Indoor Environment, Vehicular Technology, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 748 754, Aug. 1997. [21] H. Zhang, T. Udagawa, T. Arita and M.Nakagawa, A Statistical Model for the Small-scale Multipath Fading Characteristics of Ultra Wideband Indoor Channel, Ultra Wideband Systems and Technologies, Digest of Papers. IEEE Conference on, pp. 8186, 2002. [22] T.S. Rappaport, Wireless Communications Principles and Practice. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1996.