Verification of 3D ray tracing with measurements in urban macrocellular environments

3D ray tracing has meanwhile advanced to a performance that it can provide channel parameters such as delay spread, Doppler spread, angular spread, distribution functions of long- and short-term fading with high accuracy for fixed to mobile and mobile to mobile communications. These parameters are absolutely required during the specification phase in order to define the air interface and a variety of other relevant system parameters. This paper shows state of the art 3D ray tracing capabilities. The 3D ray tracing model developed at the University of Karlsruhe is described and verified with wide-band non-directional and directional measurements at 2GHz and 5.2GHz respectively, showing a good agreement. The proposed 3D ray tracing model can therefore be used in order to extract parameter sets for the specification of future mobile communications systems and to optimize existing ones.