Measurements and Analysis of Maritime Wireless Channel at 8 GHz in the South China Sea Region

This article presents the measurement results of maritime wireless propagation channel at 8 GHz in the South China Sea (SCS) region. Large-scale path loss (PL) and small-scale fading of channels between a marine observation platform and a moving vessel are investigated. For large-scale PL, comparisons are conducted among the free space model, the two-ray model, the parabolic equation model (PEM), and the log-distance model with the measured PL data. The results show that the log-distance model agrees well with the general trend of the measured data, whereas the PEM has a better ability to capture the variations of the interference nulls. In addition, the free space model and the two-ray model have larger deviation from the empirical data, implying that they are not suitable for the desired scenario. For small-scale fading, various distributions are considered to fit the fading. Based on the criteria of Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics, the Rician distribution has the best goodness of fit, compared with the Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, Welbull, or lognormal distributions. These research can provide good guidance for efficient designing and future deployments of distributed buoy networks (DBNs) in the SCS region.