Small-Scale Channel Characteristics of Shadowing Effect in Maritime Wireless Communication

This study examines the shadowing effects on shore-to-ship radio links caused by passing vessels in maritime environments. Leveraging a month's data from the Norwegian Coastal Administration's Automatic Identification System (AIS), we concluded that the probability of shadowing effect occurrences in this region exceeds 60%, which indicates the importance of this study. Furthermore, we conducted an empirical analysis based on high-resolution channel measurements at 2.075 GHz in Trondheimfjorden, Norway. The amplitude distribution was investigated during the entire shadowing process, including obstructed line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios. Due to limitations of conventional amplitude distributions in accurately depicting this phenomenon, an innovative model - the Rician plus Lognormal distribution (RPLN) was proposed in this paper. This model effectively captures the probability density of the amplitude during different shadowing procedure phases. Its effectiveness was evaluated using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), where it outperformed conventional distribution models.