Semi-analytical approach to predict path loss in urban environment

Ray tracing models have shown good path loss prediction accuracy in microcellular environments. However, these techniques have great computational and memory requirements. The purpose of this paper is to derive semi-analytical propagation formula based approach for predicting signal path loss in a given urban street environment by assuming that transmitter and receiver are placed at middle of street and taking into account the effects of dominant paths of reflection, single diffraction and reflection-diffraction along the main and side street walls and street corners respectively. We have then compared the results obtained using this approach for path loss with ray tracing results. The results are found to be in good agreement with ray tracing results for the same assumptions. Basic advantage of using analytical approach is reduction in speed to a great extent. While ray tracing method takes several minutes to compute the results, this approach takes few seconds even for complex structures.