Measurements and Modeling of Large-Scale Channel Characteristics in Subway Tunnels at 1.8 and 5.8 GHz

Radio propagation characteristics in subway tunnels are significant for designing reliable wireless communications. To obtain large-scale channel characteristics, extensive propagation measurements are conducted in a straight subway tunnel at 1.8 and 5.8 GHz, respectively. Based on the measurements, some typical large-scale channel parameters are extracted and modeled, such as path loss, shadow fading, and channel correlation. The path loss exponents are found to be 2.83 and 2.55 at 1.8 and 5.8 GHz, respectively, with shadow fading standard deviation of 1.58 and 2.58 dB. Shadow fading decorrelation distance is 8.71 m for 1.8 GHz and 11.65 m for 5.8 GHz, respectively. Moreover, cross-correlation coefficient of shadow fading in two dual-link scenarios is around 0.1, which shows that there is fairly low cross-correlation in a subway tunnel. The results in this letter are useful for link budget, handover scheme design, and network planning of subway communication system.