1998 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation
Volume 46 Number 8, August 1998

Effect of Terrain on Path Loss in Urban Environments for Wireless Applications

Page 1138.

Abstract:

Path-loss prediction algorithms for advanced wireless communication system planning have long considered the effect of electromagnetic propagation over buildings between the base station and subscriber. This phenomena is particularly important in residential areas, where the houses are typically a few stories high. For the most part, the buildings were assumed to lie on level terrain, although shadowing effects by terrain in the absence of buildings has been included. Previous works have offered a number of methods to quantitatively determine these effects from path profiles. This study examines propagation over buildings when the buildings are located on terrain features (hills). The buildings, which are represented by a series of absorbing half screens, are assumed to lie in rows that are equally spaced along parallel streets, with the streets running perpendicular to the terrain slope. Numerical results are obtained using successive repetition of the Kirchhoff-Huygens approximation. A phenomenological model based on ray optics for diffraction over a smooth surface is proposed as a way to interpret the numerical results. The dependence of model coefficients on terrain parameters are obtained from the numerical results.

References

1. Y. Okumura, E. Ohmori, T. Kawano, and K. Fukuda, "Field strength and its variability in VHF and UHF land-mobile radio service," Rev. Elect. Commun. Lab., vol. 16, no. 9/10, pp. 825-884, Sept./Oct. 1968.
2. W. C. Y. Lee, "Studies of base-station antenna height effects on mobile radio," IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. VT-29, pp. 252-260, May 1980.
3. K. Bullington, "Radio propagation for vehicular communications," IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. VT-26, pp. 295-308, Nov. 1977.
4. G. Lampard and T. Vu-Dinh, "The effect of terrain on radio propagation in urban microcells," IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 42, pp. 314-317, Aug. 1993.
5. D. E. Eliades, "Alternative derivation of the cascaded cylinder diffraction model," Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng., vol. 140, no. 4, pp. 279-284, Aug. 1993.
6. J. D. Parsons, The Mobile Radio Propagation Channel, 1st ed.New York: Wiley, 1992.
7. J. Walfisch and H. L. Bertoni, "A theoretical model of UHF propagation in urban environments," IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 36, pp. 1788-1796, Dec. 1988.
8. H. H. Xia and H. L. Bertoni, "Diffraction of cylindrical and plane waves by an array of absorbing half screens," IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 40, pp. 170-177, 1992.
9. S. R. Saunders and F. R. Bonar, "Prediction of mobile radio wave propagation over buildings of irregular heights and spacings," IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 42, pp. 137-144, Feb. 1994.
10. L. R. Maciel, H. L. Bertoni, and H. H. Xia, "Unified approach to prediction of propagation over buildings for all ranges of base station antenna height," IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 42, pp. 41-45, Feb. 1993.
11. L. E. Vogler, "An attenuation function for multiple knife-edge diffraction," Radio Sci. vol. 19, pp. 1541-1546, 1982.
12. J.-E. Berg and H. Holmquist, "An FFT multiple half-screen diffraction model," in Proc. Veh. Technol. Conf., Stockholm, Sweden, June 1994, pp. 195-199.
13. J. B. Keller, "Diffraction by a convex cylinder," IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. AP-24, pp. 312-321, 1956.
14. G. L. James, Geometrical Theory of Diffraction for Electromagnetic Waves.Stevenage, U.K.: Peter Peregrinus Ltd., 1976.
15. H. L. Bertoni, W. Honcharenko, L. R. Maciel, and H. H. Xia, "UHF propagation prediction for wireless personal communications," Proc. IEEE vol. 82, no. 9, pp. 1333-1359, Sept. 1994.
16. L. B. Felsen and N. Marcuvitz, Radiation and Scattering of Waves.Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
17. L. R. Maciel, H. L. Bertoni, and H. H. Xia, "Propagation over buildings for paths oblique to the street grid," in Proc. Int. Symp. Personal Indoor Mobile Radio Commun., Boston, MA, Oct. 1992, pp. 75-79.
18. M. Born and E. Wolf, Principles of Optics.New York: Pergamon, 1964.
19. K. Hacking, "R.F. propagation over rounded hills," Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. vol. 117, no. 3, pp. 499-511, Mar. 1970.