A Deterministic approach to evaluate path loss exponents in large-scale outdoor 802.11 WLANs

Accurate network planning is critical with deployments of large outdoor wireless networks. Propagation and path loss considerations are key factors in predicting performance of wireless networks. We are currently studying large-scale wireless networks for US railway environments. In this study, both theoretical and measurement based propagation models indicate that the average received signal power decreased logarithmically with distance. The average large-scale path loss is expressed as a function of distance between the transmitter and the receiver by using a path loss exponent n and the close-in reference distance d₀. However, it is very important to select a suitable space reference distance that is appropriate for a specific propagation environment. In this paper, a deterministic approach is proposed to select an appropriate reference distance for a given propagation environment. Also a minimum mean square error (MMSE) based method is introduced to compute path loss exponents. Furthermore the comparison between the site specific measurement data collected from our testbed and the estimated values verifies the accuracy of our proposed method.