Propagation Model of Hata-Okumura

The Hata-Okumura computation model was first described by Yoshihisa Okumura in 1968 in his publication "Field Strength and Its Variability in VHF and UHF Land-Mobile Radio Service". In 1980, Masaharu Hata simplified the considerations from Okumura ("Empirical formula for propagation loss in Land Mobile Radio Services"). These simplifications led to the restriction that only regions with less than 20 km distance to the transmitter can be predicted. As only four parameters are required, the computation time is very short. This is an advantage of this model. However, the model neglects the terrain profile between transmitter and receiver, i.e. hills or other obstacles between the transmitter and the receiver are not considered. As Hata and Okumura made the assumption, that the transmitter would normally be located on hills, this was no disadvantage. Also phenomena like reflection and shadowing are not included. The four parameters with their limits are:

Frequency f (150...1500 MHz) Distance between transmitter and receiver d (1...20 km) Antenna height of the transmitter hTX (30...200 m) Antenna height of the receiver hRX (1...10 m)

As the height of the transmitter and the receiver is measured relative to the ground, an effective antenna height heff is additionally used and added to the antenna height of the transmitter (see figure below). This also improves the accuracy of the prediction.

The items marked red in the figure show the parameters of the Hata-Okumura model. The green marked items are neglected. In this example the prediction would be too optimistic, because the model assumes LOS (oine of sight), but the actual path is obstructed by two hills.

The following equations show the computation of the basci path loss a (in dB) with the model of Hata-Okumura.

Additionally to the basic loss, there are correction terms which characterize different environments:

Some modifications to the equations for rural or open environment are necessary. They are taken into account in the following formulas:

The figure illustrates the variation of the correction terms depending on the frequency (relative to the basic path loss a)

Looking at typical propagation scenarios, the following values are assumed for the examples shown in the section: propagation frequency f : 900 MHz transmitter height hTX : 40 m receiver height hRX : 1.5 m distance d: 10 km

The computation leads to the following results

effective antenna height: 38.5 m correction factor c: -9.19*10-4 dB basic loss: 159.32 dB loss in open area: 130.81 dB

This result shows a higher path loss than the free space loss (a~109 dB).

As already mentioned, the upper frequency limit of the Hata-Okumura model is about 1500 MHz. Therefore, a solution had to be found for the frequency band between 1500 MHz and 2100 MHz (e.g. GSM1800, GSM1900, UMTS). The COST 231 initiative has proposed an extension to the Hata-Okumura model by analysing Okumuras equations in the upper frequency band. This model is called "COST-Hata-Model".