A simulation model for ship-to-ship rayleigh fading channels

Accurate modeling of the ship-to-ship (S2S) fading channels is critical not only to the shipborne automatic identification system design but also to the verification and performance evaluation of other maritime wireless communication systems. The statistical properties of S2S fading channels are quit different from either the terrestrial-based mobile communication channels or the typical fixed-to-mobile maritime radio channels, thereby requiring new methods for their simulation. This paper for the first time proposes a two-ring model to simulate the S2S local scttering environment and develops a statistical sum-of-sinusoids simulator for Rayleigh fading. The new model has a lower mean square error of the auto-correlation and cross-correlation functions, i.e., the statistical properties almost converge to the desired ones. In addtion, this model yields adequate statistics with only 15 simulation runs.