A random-phase-assisted ray-tracing model and its verification with a spatio-temporal channel measurement in suburban micro-cellular environments

This paper reports a measurement carried out at 8.45 GHz to determine the spatio-temporal propagation characteristics in suburban micro-cell environments. In order to confirm the applicability of ray-tracing approaches in modeling propagation channels, a hybrid 2D-3D ray-tracing algorithm is also verified in terms of the path-loss and azimuth-delay profiles. To account for tree-attenuation effects, a simple but effective tree-attenuation model is developed and verified with measurement. The results indicated that the received signals are much concentrated in a small delay interval and spread in a small angular range. This effect is more obvious in line-of-sight (LOS) environments than in NLOS environments. Furthermore, the scattering effects nearby the receivers can not be neglected also, which are normally omitted in statistical channel modeling approaches. The verification between ray-tracing and measurement demonstrated that ray-tracing approaches can accurately predict the spatio-temporal channel parameters in micro-cell environments.