Environmental information-aided electromagnetic propagation testbed for maritime communication

Maritime channel modeling can be affected by some key time-varying environmental factors. The ducting effect is one of the thorniest factors since it causes anomalous propagation enhancement and severe co-channel interference. Moreover, the atmospheric attenuation is much more severe in the ocean environment, resulting in shorter coverage distance and more link outage. In this paper, we propose an environmental information-aided electromagnetic propagation testbed. It is based on complex refractivity estimation and improved parabolic equation propagation model, taking into account both ducting effect and atmospheric attenuation. A large-scale temporal and spatial propagation measurement was conducted with meteorological acquisition. We consider practical path loss and ducting conditions to verify the testbed feasibility in these long-distance radio links. The simulation results are in good agreement with the measured data, which further reveal the basic temporal and spatial distribution of ducting effect at 3.5 GHz band.