Ultra-wideband channel modeling on the basis of information-theoretic criteria

We present results of two ultra-wideband (UWB) channel measurement campaigns in the 2-5 GHz frequency band, and use Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) to determine suitable distributions for the channel impulse response taps. Despite the large bandwidth, AIC supports the complex Gaussian Cap distribution, with mean depending on the measurement setting. We estimate the empirical covariance matrix of the channel impulse response, and demonstrate that the number of corresponding significant eigenvalues scales approximately linearly with bandwidth, albeit we find that channel taps are correlated.