ing approximation of the ring structures was appropriate.

Our simulation results showed that slits could be introduced to the ring structures without distorting the frequency response of the resonator. We also found two sets of resonance peaks which can be understood as being due to the existence of two different coupling mechanisms: one through the electric eld, and the other through the magnetic eld. For innitely thin conductors, the two sets of peaks could be observed for both edge- and side-coupled ring resonators. It was also demonstrated that one could accurately determine the dielectric constant of the substrate by tting the FDTD simulation results of a ring resonator response to the experimentally observed S21-parameter spectrum.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

19. S.-L. Lu and A.M. Ferendeci, Coupling parameters for a sidecoupled ring resonator and a microstrip line, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 44 1996., 953 956. 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

URBAN CHANNEL PROPAGATION MODELING USING THE SHOOTING AND BOUNCING RAY TECHNIQUE
I. Y. Kelly,1 H. Ling,1 and W. J. Vogel1 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1084 Recei ed 7 October 1999 ABSTRACT: A study of urban channel characteristics is carried out using the shooting and bouncing ray technique. Propagation characteristics are generated from the simulation, and are compared to measurement results for the downtown area of Austin, TX, at 1.9 GHz. Antenna di ersity studies are also carried out using the simulation. 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 24: 396 399, 2000. Key words: propagation; channel modeling; SBR; CPATCH 1. INTRODUCTION

The authors thank Steven Perini and Michael Lanagan for providing the experimental data of Figure 10.
REFERENCES 1. M.E. Mayercik, Resonant microstrip rings and dielectric material testing, Microwaves Apr. 1991., 95 102. 2. P.A. Barnard and J.M. Gantray, Measurement of dielectric constant using a microstrip ring resonator, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 39 1991., 592 595. 3. H.A. Wheeler, Transmission line properties of parallel strips separated by a dielectric shield, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech MTT-13 1965., 172 185. 4. M.V. Schneider, Microstrip lines for microwave integrated circuits, Bell Syst Tech J 48 1969., 1421 1444. 5. E.O. Hammerstad, Equations for microstrip circuit design, Proc European Microwave Conf, Hamburg, Germany, Sept. 1975, pp. 268 272. 6. I.J. Bahl and D.K. Trivedi, A designers guide to microstrip line, Microwaves May 1977., 174 181. 7. K. Chang, Microwave ring circuits and antennas, Wiley, New York, 1996. 8. I. Wolff and N. Knoppik, Microstrip ring resonator and dispersion measurements on microstrip lines, Electron Lett 7 1971., 779 781. 9. R.P. Owens, Curvature effect in microstrip ring resonators, Electron Lett 12, 1976., 356 357. 10. S.G. Pintzos and R. Pregla, A simple method for computing the resonant frequencies of microstrip ring resonators, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech MTT-26 1978., 809 813. 11. K. Chang, T.S. Martin, F. Wang, and J.L. Klein, On the study of microstrip ring and varactor-tuned ring circuits, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech MTT-35 1987., 1288 1295. 12. A. Taove, Computational electrodynamics. The nite-difference time-domain method, Artech House, Boston, MA, London, England, 1995. 13. I.S. Misra and, S.K. Chowdhury, Concentric microstrip ring antenna: Theory and experiment, J Electromag Waves Appl 10 1996., 439 450. 14. C.A. Harber, Handbook of thick lm hybrid microelectronics, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974. 15. G. Mur, Absorbing boundary conditions for the nite-difference approximation of the time-domain electromagnetic-eld equations, IEEE Trans Electromag Compat EMC-23 1981., 377 382. 16. E.O. Brigham, The fast Fourier transform and its applications, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1988. 17. G.K. Gopalakrishnan and K. Chang, Study of slits in microstrip ring resonators for microwave and optoelectronic applications, Microwave Opt Technol Lett 5 1992., 76 79. 18. S.-L. Lu and A.M. Ferendeci, Coupling modes of a ring resonator side coupled to a microstrip line, Electron Lett 30 1994., 1013 1015.

As the demand for wireless personal communications increases, so does the need for accurate propagation channel models in complex environments. In this work, we carry out a study to characterize the urban propagation channel by using ray tracing. We consider a ray tracer based on the shooting and bouncing ray SBR. technique w1 3x. The particular scenario addressed has a base-station antenna height below the level of the average urban building, and falls into the microcell category. Propagation characteristics such as slowfade and fast-fade distributions are examined and compared to measurement results for the downtown area of Austin, TX. The application of the simulation is demonstrated by carrying out spatial and polarization diversity studies. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the simulation methodology, and present results of the urban channel characteristics simulated using the SBR-based code CPATCH w3x on a CAD model of downtown Austin, TX. In Section 3, the simulation results are compared against measurement data. Both the slow-fade and fast-fade characteristics are examined. In Section 4, an antenna diversity study is carried out using the simulator. Spatial diversity and polarization diversity schemes are investigated to determine the diversity gains of the different scenarios.
2. RAY-TRACING SIMULATION

The SBR-based code CPATCH is used to carry out urban channel simulation. CPATCH is designed for the calculation of antenna coupling in complex environments. It performs these calculations by shooting a dense grid of geometric optic rays from the transmitting antenna, and tracing the rays as they multiply reect among the surfaces of a CAD description of the environment. After the ray tracing is carried out, the received signal at the receiving antenna is computed by
Contract grant sponsor: Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board under the Texas Advanced Technology Program

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summing up the contributions of each ray via a ray-tube integration scheme w1, 4x. The simulation is carried out using a CAD model of the downtown area of Austin, TX, that came from an architects rendition Fig. 1.. The part of Austin on which the simulations were run is focused around Congress Avenue. A transmitting antenna is placed 18 m above the ground plane at the intersection of Congress Avenue and 7th Street. A grid consisting of 70 blocks ten cross streets from north to south, 11th 2nd Street., and seven down streets with Congress Avenue at the center is used to approximate a cell with a diameter of about 1 km. All calculations are made at 1.91 GHz, and both transmitting and receiving antennas were dipoles. The strength of the received signal is simulated at multiple-receiver locations. The computed power signal along Congress Avenue is shown in Figure 2. Because Congress Avenue contains the transmitting antenna, it has a direct line-of-sight LOS. receiver path. The received signal is calculated every 1 m, and is normalized with respect to the transmitted power to indicate propagation loss Fig. 2.. By using a smoothing window of 40 wavelengths, a slow or long-term fade version of this power signal can be obtained Fig. 2.. The resulting slow-fade curve is not completely smooth, but has dips along its path. The dips correspond to the location of the streets that cross Congress, indicating some channeling of power into the non-LOS cross streets.
3. COMPARISON OF SIMULATION AND MEASUREMENT

Figure 2 db lower

Power plot of Congress Avenue with smoothed signal 25

A measurement campaign was carried out in January 1997. The transmitting antenna was placed on Congress Avenue and 7th Street at a height of about 18 m, and data were collected by a moving vehicle on the street level on the same 70 blocks. Using both measurement data and ray-tracing data, power plots of the entire 70-block area were generated Fig. 3.. In Figure 3a. and b., the power plots for the simulations are compared to the measurement data. A fairly good agreement is observed between the two plots. As expected, the main LOS streets, Congress and 7th Street, have the highest signal strengths. We also observe a channeling pattern as power is being channeled into the side streets, but it gets lower as the receiver location gets farther from the

transmitter location. We note that there is a smaller dynamic range in the simulated data. There are several possible reasons for this result. First, all surfaces were assumed perfectly conducting. Thus, rays travel farther, and contribute more to the more distant receiver locations. Second, the CAD model does not contain all of the buildings located in downtown Austin. In fact, the farther from the transmitter location, the fewer buildings the model has. Even with these inaccuracies, the slow fade predicted by the simulation agrees fairly well with the measurements. Probability distribution functions pdfs. were used to compare the fast-fade component of both simulated and measured data. It is commonly believed that the Rician distribution applies for a street with a dominant line-of-sight LOS. component plus multipath components w5 7x, with a pdf described by pdf Rician y . s

/
b
2

exp

y y 2 q a2 . 2b
2

I0

/
b2

ya

1.

Figure 1

CAD model of Austin, TX

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Figure 4

Rician a parameter for measured data

we can see, these results are consistent with the measured data. The b parameter, which is a measure of the standard deviation of the signal, is fairly constant throughout.
4. DIVERSITY STUDY

Figure 3 a. Simulated data power plot for downtown Austin, TX. b. Measurement data power plot for downtown Austin, TX

where I0 is the modied Bessel function. In the above expression, the LOS component is taken into account by the parameter a, which is proportional to the amplitude of the LOS signal. The b parameter is a measure of the standard deviation of the signal. For signals without an LOS component, the above expression reduces to the Rayleigh distribution i.e., a s 0.: y yy 2 2 b2

pdf Rayleigh y . s

/
b2

exp

2.

Both the measured and simulated data were tted to the Rician distribution in 1. using data from a 25 m moving window. Figure 4 shows the results for the a parameter for measurement data. We found that the main LOS streets Congress and 7th. contained the highest a parameter, and thus are highly Rician, as are the portions of the side streets closest to these streets. However, a dropped to approximately zero on the streets farthest from the transmitter location. Thus, the farther from the transmitter, the closer to the Rayleigh distribution the pdf becomes. The simulated results are also indicated in Figure 4 at a few selected locations. As

In this section, an antenna diversity study is carried out using the simulator. Both spatial diversity and polarization diversity schemes are investigated to determine the diversity gains of the different scenarios. The main goal of using antenna diversity is to minimize deep fades while keeping the mean power levels high. For the spatial diversity study, two transmitting dipoles are spaced 3 m apart. A single dipole receiver at a 45 slant is used to emulate the position of a handset being held to the ear of a user. The signals from the two spatially diverse channels are combined to form a single signal of stronger strength. We should point out that, although the uplink case is usually of more practical interest as opposed to the downlink scenario depicted in the simulation, the two results should be identical since the principle of reciprocity can be invoked. The transmitters are again placed on Congress Avenue and 7th Street at a height of 18 m. The receiver is run along Congress Avenue. The combined signal obtained from the two spatially diverse antennas is higher than that of the single antenna. Furthermore, the deep nulls in the single-antenna case are mostly mitigated. The cumulative distribution functions cdfs. for the case with and the case without spatial diversity are tabulated, and are shown in Figure 5a.. There is an approximate 6 dB gain when two spatially diverse antennas are used as compared to using a single antenna. Next, a polarization diversity study is carried out. The scenarios considered here are similar to those used in the measurement campaign reported in w8x. In the rst case, a pair of cross dipoles is used as the transmitter, one being vertically polarized and the other being horizontally polarized. The receiving antenna is again a single dipole at a 45 slant. When the signal in each channel is monitored separately, it is observed that the signal strength in the horizontal channel is much lower than that in the vertical channel. Therefore, adding a horizontally polarized transmitter does not add much diversity gain, as can be seen in the comparison using the cdf in Figure 5b..

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In the second case, we consider two orthogonal transmitting dipoles oriented 45 with respect to the vertical. Again, the cdf is used as a basis for comparison. As seen in Figure 5c., the result of this test is better than that of the vertically and horizontally polarized transmitters. The diversity gain is about 3 dB. Overall, spatial diversity appears to give a much bigger diversity gain than what is achievable using polarization diversity in this urban setting.
5. CONCLUSION

A study of channel propagation characteristics in downtown Austin was carried out using the shooting and bouncing ray technique. General characteristics were extracted from simulation data. Both the large-scale power coverage and fast-fade characteristics from the simulation compared well with those obtained from measurement data at 1.9 GHz. Studies of spatial diversity and polarization diversity were carried out using simulation. Spatial diversity was found to have a larger diversity gain than polarization diversity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to thank DEMACO, Inc., for the use of the CPATCH code.
REFERENCES 1. H. Ling, R. Chou, and S.W. Lee, Shooting and bouncing rays: Calculating the RCS of an arbitrarily shaped cavity, IEEE Trans Antennas Propagat 37 1989., 194 205. 2. S. Chen and S. Jeng, SBR image approach for radio wave propagation in tunnels with and without trafc, IEEE Trans Veh Technol 45 1996., 570 578. 3. S.W. Lee, J.E. Baldauf, and R.A. Kipp, CPATCH: Antenna coupling in complex environments, DEMACO Tech Rep, Champaign, IL, Oct. 1994. 4. S.W. Lee, H. Ling, and R.C. Chou, Ray-tube integration in shooting and bouncing ray method, Microwave and Opt Technol Lett 1 1988., 286 289. 5. A.J. Goldsmith and L.J. Greenstein, A measurement-based model for predicting coverage areas of urban microcells, IEEE J Select Areas Commun 7 1993., 1013 1023. 6. R.J.C. Bultitude and G.K. Bedal, Propagation characteristics on microcellular urban mobile radio channels at 910 MHz, IEEE J Select Areas Commun 7 1989., 31 39. 7. W.C.Y. Lee, Mobile communications engineering, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1982. 8. X. Tian, H. Ling, and W. Vogel, Investigation of base-station polarization diversity in personal communication systems, 1998 USNCrURSI Nat Radio Sci Meeting Dig, Atlanta, GA, p. 145. 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 5 a. Diversity gain comparison of spatial diversity versus single dipole. b. Diversity gain of vertical and horizontal diversity versus dipole. c. Diversity gain for 45 polarized transmitters versus dipole

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