Airport Surface Propagation Channel in the C-Band: Measurements and Modeling

In this paper, we assess the path loss and the multipath fading characteristics of the airport surface channel based on the measurement data collected at Munich airport at 5.2 GHz. Our goal is to present channel models for the ground, tower and ramp area of the airport surface, which are easy to implement in a channel emulator and suitable for performance evaluation of the future aeronautical airport data link AeroMACS. The channel is in general nonstationary, but within one data frame and correspondingly one simulation run, the WSSUS assumption can be adopted for all scenarios related to an aircraft. However, the assumption loses its validity in the case of service vehicles moving in the NLOS ramp area. The proposed stochastic model for the small scale fading channel uses a sum-of-sinusoids based tapped delay line with a fixed channel parameters which are randomly chosen from the suitable intervals for each new simulation run. Incorporating scatterer movements into the model enables modeling of a nonstationary channel impulse response.