Non-Stationary 3D M2M Channel Modeling and Verification With Aircraft-to-Aircraft, Drone-to-Drone, Vehicle-to-Vehicle, and Ship-to-Ship Measurements

Mobile-to-mobile (M2M) propagation channels have gained significant attention over the last years with the development of advanced communication systems for all kind of mobile stations such as aircraft, drones, cars, and ships. However, most available channel models do not account for the environment where the stations are located, but are defined for either average or worst-case conditions, not being able to predict the channel behaviour in specific scenarios. This is especially true for the scattering components of the channel, which are generally either ignored or defined as a rough extrapolation of the scattering components observed in other scenarios. In this work, we propose a geometry-based channel modeling technique that can be applied to any M2M scenario and that can calculate the channel accurately based on the environment around the stations. We first use finite and infinite planes to model the environment. Then, we use the proposed channel modeling technique to obtain analytically the contributions of each plane to the delay-dependent and joint delay Doppler probability density functions of the channel, as well as its squared delay/Doppler-spread function. Our technique focuses mainly on the scattering components but it also addresses the line-of-sight and specular reflection components. We apply the proposed channel modeling technique to different aircraft-to-aircraft, drone-to-drone, car-to-car, and ship-to-ship scenarios where channel measurements are available. In all scenarios, the channel estimated using the proposed channel modeling technique matches the channel measurements very accurately. Specifically, we observe that the scattering components are recreated very faithfully, and that we can even estimate how the channel evolves over time as the stations move and are affected differently by the environment.