Finite-state Markov modeling of fading channels: A field measurement in high-speed railways

A field channel measurement is carried out in highspeed railways (HSRs) along the “Luoyang South-Lintong East” line of China, and the finite-state Markov channel (FSMC) modeling is exploited to characterize the small-scale fading channels. The large-scale path loss can be predicted relatively precisely since the line-of-sight (LOS) propagation component dominates the wireless channel in HSR, while the small-scale fadings will be a key to the future wireless network for HSR. Hence, this paper proposes a first-order FSMC modeling to describe the fast small-scale fadings in two typical HSR scenarios, i.e., viaduct and terrain cutting. Firstly, the sliding window method is used to remove the large-scale effect of the field data. Then the Rayleigh, Rician and Nakagami distributions are respectively tested to fit the envelope of small-scale fadings, and the results show that Rician distribution can effectively capture the statistical property of HSR channels. Then, a first-order FSMC is proposed based on the Rician distribution. Finally, the experimental results reveal that four-state FSMC modeling provides an effective way to reflect the dynamic nature of the fast fadings in HSR.