ABSTRACT
Knowledge of the propagation characteristics of a channel is the bread and butter of radio communication engineers. Without this kno"rledge, a radio engineer can never design a good radio communication system. This chapter seeks to address this issue by introducing the modelling of the radio propagation channel. All three pertinent mobile communication systems are presented, namely the indoor wireless channel, the outdoor/urban wireless channel and the satellite wireless channel. Section 4.2 will familiarise the readers with some fundamental problems encountered in these different radio environments. Section 4.3 presents some pertinent parameters for a general radio channel. In this chapter, two families of radio channel models are introduced, namely the multipath fading radio channel models, which are applicable for small scale fading channels, and the large scale path loss models, when radio wave propagation over a large distance is considered. Section 4.4 and Section 4.5 will look at these families of channel model respectively.
