Whilst large scale noise-mapping techniques have been applied extensively in practice, as required by the EU Directive on environmental noise, they are often not applicable for microscale urban areas such as a street or a square. This talk will discuss a series of simulation techniques as well as related acoustic theories for accurately calculating the sound field for micro-scale urban areas. T...

The requirements of location based and emergency caller localization services spurred by the E-911 mandate (USA) and the E-112 initiative (EU) have generated the demand for the availability of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in harsh environments like indoors, urban canyons or forests where low power signals dominate. This fact has pushed the development of High Sensitivity (HS) rece...

Rows of tall buildings can create a unique urban habitat known as a street canyon. These canyons trap traffic pollutants, limiting their dispersal into the atmospheric boundary layer that extends as high as 2,000 meters above the ground. A new study suggests that vegetation in street canyons may reduce air-pollutant concentrations much more than previously reported and suggests innovative plant...

It is now widely accepted that GPS meets, under ideal operational conditions, all attributes of a ubiquitous positioning system, i.e. accuracy, reliability and availability. However, its performance quickly deteriorates in certain environments, such as indoors or in urban canyons. In such environments, the demand for location based services (LBS) is growing exponentially, mainly because of the ...

This research proposes an accurate vehicular positioning system which can achieve lane-level performance in urban canyons. Multiple passive sensors, which include Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, onboard cameras and inertial sensors, are integrated in the proposed system. As the main source for the localization, the GNSS technique suffers from Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) propag...

In this paper we measured the soft-handover (SHO) probability at and near street crossings in UMTS. Literature quotes two main propagation paths in urban macro-cell scenarios: along street-canyons and over the rooftops. Due to the fact that propagation along street canyons is one of the main propagation paths we expected high SHO probability at street crossings. To evaluate this effect we measu...

Flow and dispersion of traffic pollutants in a generic urban neighborhood with avenue-trees were investigated with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In Part I of this two-part contribution, quality assessment and assurance for CFD simulations in urban and vegetation configurations were addressed,before in Part II flow and dispersion in a generic urban neighborhood with multiple layouts of ave...