Statistical Modeling of Evaporation Duct Channel for Maritime Broadband Communications

The sixth-generation communication networks aim to integrate space, air, and ground communications into a robust network. However, maritime communications are confronted with the challenge of the atmospheric duct, which could capture wireless signals and propagate beyond the line of sight. In this paper, a parabolic equation-based modeling approach is proposed to characterize the maritime evaporation duct channel. The constant coefficients of each variable in the modeling are calculated by the least square method, and the specific distribution of shadow fading in channel modeling is determined by the Kullback-Leibler divergence method. Furthermore, the partitioning around medoids method is utilized to reduce the average deviation and improve the accuracy of the model. Numerical results illustrate that the statistical channel model possesses satisfactory calculation ability at the distance of signal interference caused by the evaporation duct. In addition, the paper analyzed the influence of the antenna height and downtilt angle on signal propagation.