A spatio-temporal channel measurement and ray-tracing validation in suburban microcell environments

This paper reports a spatio-temporal measurement carried out in a suburban microcell environment. The spatio-temporal channel parameters are obtained by a wideband delay profile measuring channel sounder and a directional parabolic antenna. A hybrid 2D-3D ray tracing model is used to validate the application of ray tracing approaches for spatio-temporal channel modeling. The focus of this paper is to describe a tree attenuation model and a random phase approach incorporated into the ray tracing model. The improved accuracy is verified by comparing with the measurement data. The results indicate that 1) ray tracing approaches can predict the spatio-temporal channel parameters to some extent in microcell environments: 2) the scattering model nearby the receiver is important in microcell environments; 3) the arrived waves are much more concentrated in a small delay interval in LOS than those in NLOS.