Doppler Shift Characterization of Wideband Mobile Radio Channels

The prevailing approach for characterizing the Doppler shift (DS) of mobile radio channels assumes the transmission of an unmodulated carrier. This consideration is valid for the analysis of narrowband channels, but its pertinence is questionable in regards to the modeling of wideband channels. In this correspondence, we redefine the DS from a time-frequency analysis perspective that does not depend on the aforementioned assumption. We systematically demonstrate that the DS can be characterized by the instantaneous frequency of the channel transfer function. This generic definition makes evident a fundamental aspect of the DS that is seldom acknowledged, namely, the DS is a frequency-varying quantity. We show that the second-order statistics of wideband mobile radio channels are non-stationary due to the DS's frequency variations. In addition, we present numerical results of a case study showing that such non-stationarities can cause significant system performance degradations.