Wideband channel characterization for wireless communications inside a short haul aircraft

This work presents a part of the results of a test campaign for channel propagation in aircraft cabins. The measurements were performed in February 2002 in an Airbus A319 in Hamburg (Germany), a single-aisle short-haul aircraft. Wideband measurements were performed inside the passenger's area to determine the propagation characteristics of the indoor cabin environment for personal wireless communications at the downlink band of a UMTS FDD system. The paper describes the measurement site and technique, the scenario under scope, and discusses the results of the statistical analysis for the impulse response characterization. The results of the analysis show that the cabin can be divided into 5 areas of roughly 3 m long each. In each of these areas the parameters of the linear filter modelling the impulse response are governed by the same law. The main outputs of the study are: (i) the distribution of the number of multipath components follows a Nakagami distribution; (ii) the mean amplitude of the multipath components for a certain delay results in an exponential function, with amplitude decaying exponentially with the distance and a different decay factor for each of the five areas of the cabin; (iii) the variations of the echo amplitude with respect to its mean is described by a log-normal distribution in most of the cabin area and by a Nakagami distribution at the furthest positions; (iv) the rms delay spread over the cabin increases with increasing transmitter-receiver distance.