Effect of terrain irregularities and clutter distribution on wave propagation at 3.5 GHz in suburban area

Empirical and semi-deterministic propagation prediction models are popular to provide implicative sense of propagation prediction simply due to the ease of implementation and the ability to give reasonable coverage estimation. State-of-the-art propagation models succeed with higher accuracy by including the propagation effects due to terrain irregularities as well as clutter distribution. A realistic environment may consist of a mixture of different terrain types as well as clutter groups. Therefore, each transmission path could be unique if all signature characteristics were captured. In order to study the wave propagation over each transmission path, the terrain profile along with the clutter information of each path must be evaluated. This paper investigates the wave propagation at 3.5 GHz over irregular terrain with clutter information at a suburban area based on the terrain profile derived from a self-tailored 3D digital elevation model (DEM) of Hetzwege in Germany. The simulation results will be verified with measurements determined from a mobile WiMAX system (IEEE 802.16e) deployed in the region.