Short-Term Fading Behavior in High-Speed Railway Cutting Scenario: Measurements, Analysis, and Statistical Models

Cuttings are widely used in high-speed railway (HSR) transportation to ensure the flatness of rails. The special structure of cuttings results in rich reflection and scattering, and creates dense multipath components. This paper presents a series of measurements of the propagation channel at 930 MHz conducted along the “Zhengzhou-Xi´an” HSR of China, to characterize the small-scale fading behavior of rail-cutting scenarios as a function of the geometry of cuttings, including crown width and bottom width. Raw data are collected in six cuttings (five cuttings are used for developing the model, while the other one is used for validation) in rural and suburban environments. We propose a set of effective methods to statistically model the spatial/temporal variations - including fade depth (FD), level crossing rate (LCR), average fade duration (AFD), and Ricean K-factor - as a function of the structural parameters of cuttings. Akaike´s Information Criterion (AIC)-based evaluation indicates that the Ricean distribution is the best to describe small-scale fading. In addition, the rich multipath and directionality of the transmitting antennas lead to a non-monotonous dependence of the K-factor on the distance between transmitter and receiver. The autocovariance function of the deviation of the extracted K -factors from the proposed model is presented and the coherence length is investigated. Our results show that even though a cutting is a scenario with severe fading, a “wide” cutting (i.e., with both wide crown and bottom widths) is conducive to the reduction of the severity of fading.