An Experimental Analysis and Modeling of Short-Term Fading Channel for Beyond Horizon Maritime Communications at 25 GHz in South China Sea

Abstract

Recently, millimeter-wave (mmWave) maritime communication with large bandwidth has attracted attentions as a part of future beyond 5th-Generation (B5G) space-air-ground communication networks. However, the research works on evaporation duct effectfor beyond horizon maritime channels are below K band so far. In this letter, we present a fixed-to-fixed point beyond horizon maritime channel measurement campaign at 25 GHz with a bandwidth of 25 MHz. The path loss at mmWave band via evaporation ducting is found to be on the order of free-space loss in the best case. Further, the short-term variation in power is found to be Rician fading and mainly caused by the environmental change. Further, we present empirical models for level crossing rate (LCR) and average fading duration (AFD) that outperform isotropic scatter-based model.