Stationary vs NonStationary Channels

Introduction
For the development of the communication systems, the accurate knowledge of the radio propagation environment is of crucial importance.
This calls for the need to realistic channel models that provide sufficient insight into the radio propagation mechanism. Accordingly , an
important step toward the development of realistic channel models is to better understand these mechanisms.

There exist two fundamental approaches in channel modeling; the deterministic approach and stochastic approach.

There are two major subcatagories of the deterministic approach, these are measurement based approach and ray tracing approach.
Measurement based channel models are developed by collecting empirical data from measurement campaigns carried out in real World
propagation environments.

The propagation effects and other signal impairments are often collected and categorically referred to as the channel. The additive White
gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is the channel model most often used in communication theory development.

In wireless communications, the transmitted signal arrives at the receiver in a number of different ways, e.g. , via a direct path or
reflected/diffracted/scattered ray or combinations of these. Generally a channel can be considered as a linear time variant filter, so the
channel impulse response (CIR) h(;t) can be used to repsresent the relationship between the received and transmitted signals , and is defined
as the response of the channel at time t to an impulse input at time t- . The received signal is thus the convolutional of the transmitted signal
and the CIR .

2
Especially for narrow band systems , the most important statistic of the CIR is the path loss (i.e. I h ( ; t) I ) , which refers to the

average power attenuation of the signal as it propagates through space.

Stationary Channel

If the statistical properties of a channel do not vary in time , it is called stationary. In this case, the primary statistical properties of this
channel model, such as its angle of arrival and angle of departure, do not change in time.

An important simplification in the statistical modeling of linear time varying (LTV) wireless channels is the assumption of stationarity of the
fading process in time and frequency . A restriction to first and second order stationarity results in the wide sense stationary (WSS) and
uncorrelated scattering (US) , i.e. WSSUS channels.

The uniform ring model, uniform hollow disk model, uniform circular scattering model, uniform elliptical model, gaussian scattering model,
conical scattering model, inverted parabolic model, and the Rayleigh scattering model are the most important geometry based channel
models that have been proposed in the literature, which all benefit from the wide sense stationary uncorraled scattering( WSSUS)
assumption.

Theory of Non-Stationary Channel

If the local scatterers are in motion, a channel is called physically non stationary. A moving foliage, walking pedestrians, and passing vehicles
are only a few examples of scatterers in motion. A useful theory of non-stationary processes can be found in the field of time-frequency
analysis, e.g., short time Fourier transform (STFT) or wavelets.

Owing to the non stationary natre of V2V communication channels, considering the effect of moving scatterers is of particular importance
in the corresponding channel model.

Differences
The stationary assumption is used to simplifiy the description of the correlation functions , bu stationary is hardly a property that occurs in
practice. Channel parameters like delay spread, correlation bandwidth and Rician K factor lose their meaning in non-stationary environment.
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