The Ground-to-Ground Airport Surface Area Channel: Transmission/Reception from Airport Field Sites

This paper presents measured results and an empirical 5 GHz ground-to-ground channel model for the airport surface environment. The measurements were conducted at the Miami and John Kennedy International Airports. The transmitter was located at different airport field sites (AFS) on the airport surface, and the receiver moved around the terminal and runway areas. The AFS locations were selected primarily to reach airport areas that were difficult to reach while transmitting from the air traffic control tower (ATCT). Transmitting from an AFS can significantly reduce the channel dispersion compared to when transmitting from the ATCT. Minimum, root mean square (rms) and maximum delay spread estimates are provided. Example channel transfer functions and frequency correlation estimates are also provided to enable estimates of coherence bandwidths. Representative tapped delay line channel models, along with statistical tap amplitude distributions, are provided for both airports. The close proximity of scatterers with respect to receivers' causes correlated scattering among the taps, and example correlation coefficients between the taps are given. Finally, to account for the statistical non-stationarity observed in this setting, we provide example persistence process parameters, based upon a Markov chain, to model the appearance and disappearance of multipath components