Visibility estimation for urban radio-link design

Point-to-multipoint networks acquire a great importance in modern communications due to their high data transmission capacity and installation flexibility. The planning of point-to-multipoint networks is strictly connected to the urban environment characteristics such as building heights and spatial distribution. Therefore, it is necessary to develop procedures which are able to provide the most important design factors. One of these is line-of-sight propagation path visibility. The paper describes a model based on the building density distribution for the urban area under study which provides the probability of visibility of a nodal station for a given urban area where the potential subscribers are located. If the method is applied to the radio coverage region, defined by the characteristics of the radio base station, then the efficiency of the system, in terms of visibility, can be evaluated