Deterministic Propagation Model for the Planning of Hybrid Urban and Indoor Scenarios

With the growing interest for broadband mobile services in mobile communication networks, the investigation of radio transmission in and into buildings is getting more important. Popular empirical and deterministic models for the propagation inside buildings compute the field strength based on the inner structure of the buildings (walls, furniture). But for current and future wireless networks (3G, B3G, W-LAN, WiMax,..), the neighboring buildings must also be considered to avoid interference problems in these buildings. Additionally the indoor coverage of outdoor transmitters must be analyzed to guarantee a high QoS even inside buildings. A new concept for the prediction of the field strength in such hybrid scenarios (urban and indoor) is presented in this paper. This new concept does not rely only on the direct ray (like empirical models) and it does not consider hundreds of rays for a single radio link (like ray tracing). The new model focuses on the most dominant path(s) between transmitter and receiver. The parameters of these paths are determined (e.g. path length, number and type of interactions, material properties of objects, ...) and are used for the prediction of the path loss. This model allows also the computation of the transition from an urban to an indoor scenario and vice versa, thus allowing an accurate computation of the received power inside and around buildings. For the validation of the new model, measurements were made.