The modelling of high-rise buildings' influences for application in a semi-deterministic propagation model

In this paper a newly applied approach to model the effects of high-rise blocking buildings near a base station (BS) in cellular communications networks is presented. Although recently accurate deterministic propagation prediction methods have become popular to account for these propagation effects, many mobile operators still employ rather simple and quick semi-deterministic propagation models, which use averaged geo-location information instead of actual building shapes in their calculations. In this work important insights from purely deterministic propagation theories are adopted and employed in a popular semi-deterministic model. After performing measurements, the difference in the prediction error for shadow and no-shadow areas is used to quantify the effect of the blocking object. It is found that statistical geo-location information can be used to predict the amount of blocking in a deterministic way, after application of a simple transformation algorithm. Subsequently, correction factors are proposed in order to adapt the single knife-edge diffraction model to improve the attenuation predictions and prevent the overestimation. The derived factors are based on the degree of urbanity of the environment. Multiplying the predictions of the diffraction model with the environment-based correction factors indeed significantly improves the predictions for the sectors that were studied