Comparison and Analysis of Ricean $K$-Factor Estimators in Industrial Wireless Channels

The performance constraints imposed to the use of wireless communications on industrial applications collide with the severe propagation conditions of such adverse environment. The small-scale variations due to multipath and mobility of transceiver and/or scatterers must be characterized properly in order to select the most suitable fading mitigation technique. An important parameter related to the nature of the multipath components is the Rician $K$ -factor, which can be obtained from both channel impulse response and received power level time series, also known as wideband and narrowband methods. At runtime narrowband methods are straightforward due to the reduced capability of operational wireless transceivers. In this paper, we analyze wireless channel measurements of different industrial scenarios in order to compare $K$ -factor estimators. Results indicate similarities between narrowband and a wideband $K$ -factor estimator, which means accurate channel characterization at operational time is possible. Additionally, an application example evaluates the $K$ -factor estimation on the performance of wireless communication systems.