Estimation of coverage areas in microcells

The estimation of the coverage area of a single transmitter in a microcell environment with irregular distribution and elevation of buildings is investigated in this paper. Two methods were applied to compute the coverage area of five locations of a test transmitter. The first method corresponded to a simple thresholding of the estimated path loss values provided by a deterministic propagation prediction model based on physical optics and the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction (GTD). We propose a second method to compute the coverage area based on a set of heuristic rules that combines the estimated values of the propagation path loss, information from the environment as well as data from physical measurements. We performed extensive signal strength measurements in order to evaluate the accuracy of the estimation of the coverage area. According to our results, computing the coverage area by applying a threshold to the predicted path loss values leads to significant errors, in average 20% of the map was erroneously included in the coverage area of each test location of the transmitter. We were able to reduce this error to 4% with our proposed method based on heuristic rules.