Linearized, Unified Two-Ray Formulation for Propagation over a Plane Earth

This article presents a linearized, unified (LU) path loss formulation based on the well-known two-ray propagation concept (William and Lee, 1982; Bullington, 1977). Incorporating practical concerns into the derivation of the LU path loss formulation make it useful to characterize a wide range of propagation effects for a variety of communications nodes deployed over various terrain types. The communications nodes considered include unmanned air vehicles (UAV), high altitude platforms, ground terminals, sensor nodes, and portable nodes, while the terrain ranging from open, rural, suburban, urban, mountainous, foliaged, fresh water, sea water, etc. In this article, the background and derivations of the model are outlined, examples illustrated, key results presented, deficiencies of simplified two-ray path loss models discussed, and future work identified