COMPARISONS OF A COMPUTER-BASED PROPAGATION PREDICTION TOOL WITH EXPERIMENTAL-DATA COLLECTED IN URBAN MICROCELLULAR ENVIRONMENTS

Engineers designing and installing outdoor and indoor wireless communi cations systems need effective and practical tools to help them determ ine base station antenna locations for adequate signal coverage, Compu ter-based radio propagation prediction tools are now often used in des igning these systems, In this paper, we assess the performance of such a propagation tool based on ray-tracing and advanced computational me thods. We have compared its predictions with outdoor experimental data collected in Manhattan and Boston (at 900 MHz and 2 GHz), The compari sons show that the computer-based propagation tool can predict signal strengths in these environments with very good accuracy. The predictio n errors are within 6 dB in both mean and standard deviation, This sho ws that simulations, rather than costly field measurements, can lead t o accurate determination of the coverage area for a given system desig n.