Environmental Information-Aided Electromagnetic Propagation Testbed for Maritime Communication

Maritime channel modeling can be af-fected by some key time-varying environmental fac-tors.The ducting effect is one of the thorniest fac-tors since it causes anomalous propagation enhance-ment and severe co-channel interference.Moreover,the atmospheric attenuation is much more severe in the ocean environment,resulting in shorter coverage distance and more link outage.In this paper,we pro-pose an environmental information-aided electromag-netic propagation testbed.It is based on complex re-fractivity estimation and improved parabolic equation propagation model,taking into account both ducting effect and atmospheric attenuation.A large-scale tem-poral and spatial propagation measurement was con-ducted with meteorological acquisition.We consider practical path loss and ducting conditions to verify the testbed feasibility in these long-distance radio links.The simulation results are in good agreement with the measured data,which further reveal the basic tempo-ral and spatial distribution of ducting effect at 3.5 GHz band.