Radio Network Planning with Ray Optical Propagation Models for Urban, Indoor, and Hybrid Scenarios

| Ray-optical propagation models are often used for the prediction of the field strength (and delay spread) in wireless mobile communication networks. But these models suffer from long computation times. For large areas in urban or indoor scenarios the computation times are in the range of hours which is too long for the planning of mobile radio networks. A new method for the acceleration of ray-optical models is presented in this paper. It is based on a preprocessing of the database and leads to acceleration factors near 1000, reducing the computation time to a few seconds on standard PCs. So the planning of wireless networks gets very fast. A further problem is the combination of the different data base formats. While indoor data bases contain very detailed 3D information about walls (and perhaps furniture), urban data bases are limited to the shape of the buildings (and in most cases to flat roof tops) and terrain data bases contain only the information about the topographical height. The new approach combines the data base formats in a very efficient way. Each format can be defined independent of the other formats and the interface between the formats is determined automatically. The propagation models are implemented for terrain, urban, indoor and hybrid scenarios and very accurate results are obtained with the models.