A new method of evaluating microcellular system capacity using deterministic propagation models

Site specific planning tools will become increasingly important as microcellular communication systems continue to evolve. These tools will enable system planners to design their systems far more rapidly and to minimise the cost of their development. In this paper, a new method for microcellular system capacity evaluation is presented, which proposes the use of the site specific ray-tracing propagation models developed at the University of Bristol. The propagation model includes the effects of urban shielding and shadowing in site specific environments. To simplify the processing procedure, a statistical propagation model is used to generate the signal coverage of a Rayleigh fading environment. Taking into account the particular system requirements, such as the modulation scheme, BER and outage probability, the propagation results for a given area can be extensively analysed to produce its system capacity