Monte Carlo simulation of delay and angle spread in different building environments

Advance radio system designs have been proposed that are intended to overcome or even take advantage of the impairments of the radio channel caused by multipath effects in urban environments to achieve even higher performance. The design of such systems and their evaluation requires knowledge of higher order channel statistics, such as the delay spread and angle spread. The delay and angle spreads have been measured in a few cities. However, it is not clear if the measured results are widely applicable to other building environments. To overcome this limitation, we have used a 3D ray tracing code to simulate channel statistics. Simulations have been run to find the influence of the statistical parameters describing the building distribution on delay and angular spreads. Results for elevated base station antennas show that both delay and angular spread increase as the base station antenna is lowered below roof level. Simulations for three cities having different distributions of building height show that the environment and base station antenna height have a significant effect on the angle spread but have less effect on the delay spread. However only the delay spread shows a consistent increase with the distance to the mobiles.