Effects of Carrier Frequency, Antenna Height and Season on Broadband Wireless Access in Rural Areas

The effects of carrier frequency, antenna height and season on a broadband wireless access (BWA) system deployed in a rural area at 825 MHz and 3535 MHz are studied in this paper. With the aid of digital terrain information, both large scale and small scale fading effects present in the rural channel are discussed. Our investigation found that the frequency dependence of a wireless channel varies strongly with the environment. Also, the effects of the antenna height in rural areas of irregular terrains vary with the available clearance above the clutters in the regions. This paper uses extensive measurement campaigns to quantify these effects in winter and spring using a BWA system (IEEE 802.16e) deployed in Hetzwege/Abbendorf, Germany. In the study of small scale fading, the variations of the fading distributions of the wireless channel due to season changes are derived and the corresponding multipath propagations are discussed in this paper.