Modeling of the GNSS Directional Radio Channel in Urban Areas Based on Synthetic Environments

This paper presents an approach to simulation of the GNSS directional channel based on the combination of physical and statistical methods of modeling. The key element of the model is the use of synthetic environment to represent general properties of types of environment: rural, urban, sub-urban etc. Spatial-domain characteristics of the multipath signals (time delay, angle of arrival and angular spread) are extracted with a simple geometric ray-tracing applied to the synthetic environment. Other parameters (power and fading characteristics) are obtained with a stochastic model for a land mobile satellite channel. Due to that combination of the methodsthe derived channel model preserves the speed and generality of stochastic models and allows to obtain the directional signal information by an intuitively understandble way.