Analysis of the time variant structure of microwave line-of-sight multipath phenomena

The authors report a novel technique, the SVDP (singular value decomposition prony) algorithm, which has demonstrated its superiority in identifying the multipath rays in line-of-sight microwave links. The technique has been applied to field data and it has proved itself to be a very useful tool in analyzing the time-variant structure of the actual physical mechanism, i.e. the evolution of the delay and amplitude of the multipath rays. The authors present the results of analysis of field measurements made at 11 GHz over a wide bandwidth of 400 MHz on the French CNET at Lannion, using a 50 km link. The major applications of this technique are: the modelling of a multipath channel using the least possible number of rays with the objective of minimizing the RMS error; the analysis of the time-variant structure of a channel and hence the design of adaptive equalizers; and the generation of the statistics of the time-domain multipath parameters, particularly the delay and amplitude distributions