Exploring Ergodicity over Frequency to Examine Small-Scale Propagation Effects

Wireless devices deployed in cluttered and reflective environments, e.g., the interior of a vehicle, have been shown to experience severe multipath conditions. A deeper understanding of such communication environments will be crucial to developing devices that can operate effectively within them. Many systems, e.g., wireless sensors for structural health monitoring, are deployed in nominally static environments. As such, temporal- based analyses may glean little insight to the variability due to arbitrary device placement or frequency of operation. In this work, we explore path loss data collected within a compact reverberation chamber, to emulate in-vehicle conditions, and apply stochastic analyses as a function of frequency. For our 2.4 GHz band data, second-order measures do not change by greater than 3 dB over a bandwidth of 50 MHz across a 500 cm
²
measurement area. Within this band and location, we categorize the channel as being "ergodic-like" over frequency and space.