Towards a Comprehensive Ray-Tracing Modeling of an Urban City With Open-Trench Drains for Mobile Communications

This paper investigates the impacts that open-trench drains make on the accuracy of radio propagation prediction in an urban city environment. Compared with conventional prediction styles that assume the ground to be flat, in this paper, we have considered for the first time the real scenario in many Asian cities to make open-trench drains inclusive in radio propagation modeling. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, to scrutinize one narrow L-shaped structure, modeled after an open-trench drain, by means of comparing ray-tracing simulation results with the actual field measurement results at 2.4 and 5.8 GHz. Second, to compare one city model built without and with the inclusion of open-trench drains for running ray-tracing simulation in yielding radio propagation prediction results. The findings from this paper are especially beneficial to the improvement of mobile communications in extraordinary environments such as open-trench drains, caves, coal mines, underground passageway, and others. Besides, they provide a unique insight into how the presence of the open-trench drains may affect radio wave propagation in an urban city environment.