Prediction of outdoor and outdoor-to-indoor coverage in urban areas at 1.8 GHz

A run-time efficient three-dimensional radio propagation prediction model is presented in this paper. The model allows mobile network operators to predict the outdoor and the outdoor-to-indoor coverage in dense urban areas using one general prediction model. It integrates almost all relevant propagation phenomena in dense urban areas with an accuracy comparable to the results of dedicated prediction models. The required high resolution building data is stored in vector as well as raster format. Depending on the terrain processing task, the format resulting in the shorter run-time is employed. A huge amount of measurements from the Global System for Mobile Communications 1800 network of E-Plus have been used to derive the heuristics and empirical correction factors included in the model. It is shown that the prediction accuracy can be improved significantly by considering vegetation effects and multipath propagation. Measurements justify to consider multipath propagation only up to a distance of 500 m from the base stations (BSs) in an dense urban environment. This is another source of significant run-time savings. Consequently, the prediction time of large areas decreases dramatically by neglecting multipath effects at these distances. A semiempirical building penetration extension is used to derive indoor predictions for each floor based on outdoor predictions at ground-level combined with a height gain model. An additional deterministic component is incorporated in case the BS and (parts of) the building are in line of sight. Preliminary tests show a sufficient match between the measurements and the outdoor as well as the outdoor-to-indoor predictions.