The Efficacy of Path Loss Models for Fixed Rural Wireless Links

In this paper we make use of a large set of measurements from a production wireless network in rural New Zealand to analyze the performance of 28 path loss prediction models, published over the course of 60 years. We propose five metrics to determine the performance of each model. We show that the state of the art, even for the "simple" case of rural environments, is surprisingly ill-equipped to make accurate predictions. After combining the best elements of the best models and hand-tuning their parameters, we are unable to achieve an accuracy of better than 12 dB root mean squared error (RMSE)--four orders of magnitude away from ground truth.

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