A new statistical approach for urban environment propagation modeling

Field prediction is an essential component of the planning process of cellular radio systems. This task is particularly time- and money-consuming in the urban environment, where cell size is of the order of a few hundred meters, and the influence of the city structure (building size and dimension, street width, orientation, etc.) cannot be neglected in the field prediction. For this reason, traditional statistical models such as the well-known Okumura-Hata, cannot be used in this environment, and the prediction is accomplished by means of accurate but time-consuming methods, such as ray-tracing, which require detailed and very expensive databases of the building and street layout of the city under investigation. In this correspondence, we propose a new methodology, which is based on the decomposition of propagation in its basic mechanisms, corresponding to different propagation planes, which can be treated independently from each other. This allows us to build a model which is as simple, fast, and easy to use as the traditional statistical models, with the advantage that it requires only a few statistical parameters thus realizing the need of high-resolution databases.