Channel Impulse Response and Its Relationship to Bit Error Rate at 28 GHz

Over the years, the Internet has become increasingly popular and people's dependence on it has increased dramatically. Whether it be to communicate to someone across the world, find blueprints, or check sports scores, the Internet has become a necessary resource for everyone. In emergency situations, this need increases further. After the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon, it took several days to restore communications. This is not an acceptable time frame when people's lives are at stake. Virginia Tech's Center for Wireless Telecommunication has developed a prototype of a rapidly deployable high bandwidth wireless communication system at 28 GHz (Local Multipoint Distribution Service frequency). This system provides a large bandwidth radio link to a disaster zone up to 5 km away and puts Ethernet speeds and 802.11 accesses to users within hours.

Because of the possible variability in locations that the system can be deployed, it is necessary to find the most useable channel at the site as quickly as possible. In addition to 28GHz radio links, the system also has a built-in channel sounder that measures and captures the channel impulse response of the current channel. Until now, there has been limited research on the relationship between the channel impulse response and the usability of the channel quantified using bit error rate.

This thesis examines several different channels captured by CWT's channel sounder and simulates the BER using Cadence's SPW with time-domain models of the channels. This thesis goes on further to show that BER greatly depends on the channel impulse response and the symbol rate.