Calibrating the Standard Path Loss Model for Urban Environments using Field Measurements and Geospatial Data

Path loss model is essential to achieving a successful cellular network planning and deployment. Despite the benefits derived from models that have become standard and are widely adopted, the actual applicability of these models depends on the local ambient characteristics of the environment. This means that environments that substantially differ from those used to create the models will not be adequately characterized, and so the resulting cellular planning fails to some extent. Therefore, the models used may substantially benefit from calibration to ensure fitness with the actual measurements collected over a given area. This paper presents a calibration procedure based on the Standard Propagation Model (SPM), and applies to the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands. In particular, signal strength data were collected along four routes in residential areas, and the results were then processed using the ATOLL network planning tool. Overall, we find that, after a proper calibration, the SPM provides a much better fitness, achieving average Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Standard Deviation (SDE) values of 5.40 dB, 6.90 dB and 4.29 dB, respectively, which are significantly better than the reference values without calibration (18.32 dB, 21.55 dB and 11.34 dB, respectively)