Wireless wave propagation in city street canyons

Abstract: This project aims to determine the characteristics of a wireless communication channel in city-street-canyon scenarios. The channel of a typical city intersection is modeled with a ray tracer and measured with a channel sounder. Then, the results of both tools are compared in terms of the local scattering function. The channel sounder utilized for the project was initially developed by Rui Wang et al. at the University of Southern California in a software-defined radio (SDR). It has been updated from measuring 15 MHz to 50 MHz, which required the usage of equipment with larger bandwidth and hence, the improvement of the program running on the SDR FPGA. With the updated version of the channel sounder, a measurement campaign was run in an intersection of the city of Vienna. Correspondingly, the ray tracer was developed by Mingming Gan during her Ph.D. thesis and later updated by Xuhong Li during her master thesis. The same intersection used to take measurements with the channel sounder has been modeled and simulated with the ray tracer. Then, the predictions of the ray tracer have been validated with the channel-sounder results. The comparison between both tools is used to provide a first verdict of whether the ray tracer can be utilized for wireless positioning.