Evaluating the impact of user height variations on Outdoor-to-Indoor propagation in urban macrocells and picocells using ray-tracing

This paper investigates Outdoor-to-Indoor (O2I) propagation at 2.6 GHz in urban macrocells (1 km radius) and picocells (150 m radius) including the effect of the user height variations on the statistics of the propagation Large-Scale-Parameters (LSPs) using 3D ray-tracing in the city of Bristol, UK. Path-loss is found to vary by up to approximately 10 dB between user height levels from first to eighth floor, and a user height-gain figure is used to parameterise it as a linear function of the user height. The statistics of the rest LSPs, which include shadow fading, K-factor, Root-Mean-Square (RMS) delay spread and RMS azimuth/elevation spread departure/arrival, are also analysed. Significant dependencies on the user height variations are noticed mainly for Line-of-Sight (LoS) macrocell links (e.g. the K-factor is shown to increase by about 11 dB in average as the user height increases from first to eighth floor).