Measurement-based verification of delay and angular spread ray-tracing predictions for use in urban mobile network planning

The performance of upcoming radio technologies such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMAX depends not only on the signal-to-noise ratio, but also on the time and angular dispersion in the radio channel. In this paper we analyze the delay spread and angular spread for an urban macrocell environment. Channel response measurements were performed with a 3D high-resolution channel sounder in the central area of Rotterdam. The results of the measurements are compared with the predictions of a ray-tracing based propagation model. It is shown that the accuracy of the delay spread and angular spread predictions strongly depends on the complexity of the local environment.