UWB Radiowave Propagation within the Passenger Cabin of a Boeing 737-200 Aircraft

Past efforts to develop measurement-based models of the UWB propagation channel have focused on residential, office, and industrial environments. However, with its confined volume and cylindrical structure, the geometry of the passenger cabin of a jet aircraft is fundamentally different from those environments considered previously. Here, we characterize large-scale aspects of UWB propagation within the passenger cabin of a typical mid-size airliner. Our measurement database consists of hundreds of frequency responses over the range 3.0 - 10.6 GHz that we collected aboard a Boeing 737-200 aircraft. The data were collected in a point-to-multipoint configuration in which a biconical UWB transmitting antenna was mounted at one of three locations near the cabin ceiling and an identical receiving antenna was mounted at headrest, armrest, and footrest level at over 50 locations throughout the cabin. We have accounted for the effects of human presence by collecting this data with the cabin empty, with passengers occupying half of the seats, and with passengers occupying virtually all of the seats. Our initial data reduction efforts have focused on the manner in which human presence and/or receiving antenna mounting location affects five large scale aspects of UWB propagation, i.e., those that affect coverage and reliability: (1) the distance dependence of path loss, (2) the frequency dependence of path loss, (3) the ratio of the energy in the line-of-sight component to the scattered components of the channel impulse response, (4) the RMS delay spread, and (5) the locations and distribution of the poles of the corresponding autoregressive frequency domain model.