Dominant Path Prediction Model for Urban Scenarios

Currently, for the planning of wireless cellular networks in urban scenarios either empirical (direct ray or over rooftop ray) or ray-optical (ray tracing) propagation models are used. In this paper both approaches are compared to one another and to measurements in different urban city centers. Additionally a new concept which is called Dominant Path Model (DPM) is presented in this paper. This new concept does not focus only on the direct ray (like empirical models) and it does not consider hundreds of rays for a single pixel (like ray tracing), but it focuses on the dominant path(s) between transmitter and receiver. The parameters of these dominant paths are determined and used for the prediction of the path loss between transmitter and receiver. Thus the computational effort is far below ray tracing and in the range of empirical models. But the accuracy of the new model in very complex environments (with high shadowing of the direct ray) is even higher than the accuracy of ray tracing models (because of their limitations in the number of interactions). This very high accuracy is shown with the comparison to measurements in several international cities. Keywords—wave propagation, urban, ray tracing, dominant paths, measurements