A Survey of Wireless Path Loss Prediction and Coverage Mapping Methods

In this paper we provide a thorough and up to date survey of path loss prediction methods, spanning more than 60 years of fairly continuous research. These methods take a variety of approaches to modeling the signal attenuation between wireless transceivers: purely theoretical models, empirically fitted (often statistical) models, deterministic ray-optical models, and measurement-directed methods. Our work here extends and updates excellent, but now dated prior surveys of this important field. We provide a new taxonomy for reasoning about the similarities and differences of the many approaches and provide a brief but complete overview of the various methods as well as describing insights into future directions for research in this area.