A clustering based channel model for indoor wireless communication

A number of radio channel models based on either geometrical or statistical methods have been proposed in literature. Many such models tend to simplify the scattering environment in indoor radio medium by assuming uniform distribution of scatterers and thereby overestimate the performance of the communication system. In this paper, we present a clustering based radio channel model for a wideband frequency selective Single Input Single Output (SISO) indoor wireless channel. With the transmitter and the receiver located at the foci of an ellipse, the scatterers are modeled to be present in form of clusters of scatterers distributed randomly inside the ellipse. Further, the size and hence number of scatterers inside the cluster may vary from cluster to cluster. Such representations of the scatterers are more realistic and therefore the proposed model is expected to provide better approximation to the actual indoor environment. The proposed model has been used to evaluate the performance of a generic SISO wireless link and the results are compared with those obtained using existing channel models. The proposed channel model can be extended to a frequency selective MIMO channel simulator enabling the performance evaluation of multi-antenna wideband communication systems.