A Non-WSSUS Rice Fading Channel Model for Vehicular Communications

A non-stationary doubly-selective Rice fading channel model for vehicular communication systems is presented in this paper. This new channel model is cemented on the electromagnetic theory of plane wave propagation and the geometry-based statistical modeling approach. Such framework allows obtaining a mathematically tractable and insightful description of the vehicular channel's non-stationary characteristics in the time and frequency domains. The first-order statistics, correlation properties, and spectral characteristics of the proposed channel model are thoroughly analyzed. In addition, the model's suitability to reproduce empirical data is discussed by considering its fitting against the measured Doppler profile of a real-world vehicle-to-infrastructure channel. The non-stationary doubly-selective Rice fading channel model presented here can be used as a benchmark for the performance evaluation of emerging vehicular communication systems in propagation scenarios where the rather unrealistic wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS)condition is not fulfilled.