Applicability evaluation of Okumura, Ericsson 9999 and winner propagation models for coverage planning in 3.5 GHZ WiMAX systems

Within areas lacking appropriate or having no wire infrastructure at all, fixed WiMAX is recognized as a viable business solution for delivering broadband services to the end users. While in developing countries (like Bosnia and Herzegovina), such areas are widespread among suburban and rural topography, it is of great interest to provide preconditions for planning of these networks. In order to create preconditions for WiMAX planning, the most important problem that must be solved is its coverage prediction. The problem becomes more important considering the fact that, up to date, no globally verified tool for WiMAX coverage prediction is developed. With that in mind, within our research, some of existing empirical propagation models for WiMAX coverage planning are tested with respect to real measurement results conducted all over the world. Similar analysis, with proposed novel metric for models evaluation, is presented in authors´ previous work [1], considering some of the most popular empirical propagation models, so far developed. However, in order to improve results obtained in [1], within this paper, additional set of empirical propagation model is tested, providing more general conclusion about the most appropriate empirical propagation model for 3.5 GHz WiMAX coverage planning.