Experimental Results of a Land-to-Ship Propagation Channel using a Wideband Channel Sounding System at 2.4 GHz

This paper presents the experimental results and the corresponding analysis of a radio propagation channel over the sea based on extensive measurement campaigns using a sliding correlation channel sounding system. The measurements are carried out along commercial ferry routes of up to 7 km running between two islands ports and one inland port located in the Yellow Sea (West Sea of Korea). To investigate the small-scale fading over the sea, time-dispersion parameters such as power delay profile, mean excess delay, and RMS delay spread are derived experimentally. The majority of the excess delays are found to be within 200 ns, which implies that there are few scatterers in the sea environment. As preceding studies predicted, local scatterers and reflected rays from the sea surface also reach the receiver with considerable power. In addition, the distance-based path loss model is given by each measurement site. It is shown that, when using the maximal-ratio combining method, the empirical path loss exponent is approximately 1.5, which is less than the free-space path loss exponent or the path loss exponent of ITU-R P.1546 model.