Clusters extracted from measured propagation channels in macrocellular environments

The urban physical propagation environment around the mobile station is often described as a multipath environment, where power is received through diffractions over rooftops and building corners, reflections from walls and scattering in general from other surrounding objects. Since there are only finite number of these scatterers, the waves are received in clusters each originating from one of the scattering sources. To study these scatterers, direction-of-arrival data measured along continuous routes in two small macrocellular environments were analyzed. Multipaths received with approximately the same directions and delays were combined as clusters. Therefore each of the clusters corresponds to the signal received from one scatterer. This paper focuses on both the identification of the physical scatterers in the surrounding environment and studying the radio wave propagation in more detail, including the amount of significant scatterers in terms of contributed power, XPR values, and delay and azimuth spreads of the individual clusters. The results show that there are only a few dominant scatterers. They were usually building corners and walls, and building structures over the rooftop level. The delay and azimuth spreads inside the clusters were small, and depolarization was almost negligible. Both propagation over the rooftop level and propagation along the street canyons were significant in the considered environments.