Tracking of Wideband Multipath Components in a Vehicular Communication Scenario

A detailed understanding of the dynamic processes of vehicular radio channels is crucial for its realistic modeling. In this paper, we present multipath components (MPCs) tracking results from a channel sounder measurement with 1-GHz bandwidth at a carrier frequency of 5.7 GHz. We describe in detail the applied algorithms and perform a tracking performance evaluation based on artificial channels and on measurement data from a tunnel scenario. The tracking performance of the proposed algorithm is comparable to the tracking performance of the state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density filter but with a significantly lower complexity. The fluctuation of the measured channel gain is followed very well by the proposed tracking algorithm, with a power loss of only 2.5 dB. We present statistical distributions for the number of MPCs and the birth/death rate. The applied algorithms and tracking results can be used to enhance the development of geometry-based channel models.