On the multipath order in wideband indoor propagation environments

The design of efficient wideband diversity systems and their accurate performance evaluation depends on a complete understanding of the number of multipath components, referred to as the multipath order, available in the communication channel. This paper characterizes the multipath order based on captured channel realizations from a comprehensive indoor measurement campaign performed on the MIT campus. The multipath orders are extracted from channel realizations observed at a set of center frequency and bandwidth pairs in a variety of locations. It is shown that changes in bandwidth significantly impact the multipath order, and in general the behavior is nonlinear. We first propose separate models which are only a function of bandwidth, for each center frequency. Then we develop a more general joint model which takes into account the variations caused by changes in both center frequency and bandwidth. These models are validated through statistical tests and are shown to accurately characterize the multipath order.