Propagation and coverage analysis over terrain profiles comparing empirical approaches with numerically exact solutions

Mobile radio planning requires the accurate prediction of electromagnetic field strengths over large areas and in a wide variety of environments. This present approaches to predicting field patterns present a similar behavior about the main trend in field attenuation. However, they do not give numerically or analytically exact results. The spectral acceleration forward-backward (FB/SA) is an integral equation based numerical method that obtains the exact scattering data over very undulating terrain profiles with a computational cost of O(N). In this paper, the propagation and coverage analysis problem over different terrain profiles is explored using the FB/SA. In addition, the exact solution is compared with some popular propagation models.