Mediumband Wireless Communication

The fundamental phenomenon widely known as “multipath” is unavoidable in wireless communication, and affects almost every element of modern wireless communication systems. The impact of multipath on the received signal depends on whether the delay spread (i.e., spread of time delays associated with different multipath components) is large or small relative to the signalling period of the wireless communication system. In narrowband systems, the delay spread is about one tenth (or less) of the signalling period. The delay spread and the signalling period of broadband systems are in the same order of magnitude. In between these two extremes, there appears to exist an important, yet overlooked, class of systems whose delay spread is neither small nor large enough for them to fall into these two basic classes. In this paper, the effect of multipath on this class of systems denoted henceforth as “mediumband” is studied, and its channel is characterized in compact form in order to enable future research into this class of wireless communication systems.