To understand the performance of an advance digital wireless communication systems, it is crucial to have detail knowledge of the radio channel characteristics. The channel's dispersive nature and spatial fading patterns will determine the system's radio coverage, bit error rates, transmission efficiency, call capacity, power control, antenna diversity, and a host of other issues. The main drawback of deterministic propagation models is that they require a large number of site specific information to produce accurate results. The information include a detail map of the location of each scatterer and their physical dimensions. The electric characteristics of the material for each scatterer is also required, although this information is much more difficult to obtain and often impossible to quantify simply. The purpose of this small exploratory project is to study the integration of the measured propagation path characteristics into a deterministic propagation simulation model. The research planned will include the measurement of a wideband signal in a college campus environment, the separation of the measured signal into its dominant multipath components, and the detail analysis of each path to determine the number and the degree of signal attenuation at each interaction. Individual multipaths from the measurement will be uniquely identified according to their propagation delay and direction of arrival at the receiver. Simulations using the Vertical Plane Launch (VPL) method will be performed on a detailed virtual representation of the same physical environment. The simulated propagation paths will be used to steer the measurement to the direction of the expected arrivals of the signal. The simulations will incorporate the scattering coefficients derived from the analysis of the measurements and the enhanced results will be studied to assess its accuracy. Issues such as the level of detail required in the simulation, and the multipath resolution of the measurements will be examined to determine its impact on this closed loop system.
