A TERRAIN ROUGHNESS CORRECTION FACTOR FOR HATA PATH LOSS MODEL AT 900 MHZ

This paper proposes a new propagation model based on the most widely used Hata model. The proposed model is developed by extrapolating Hata model to be suitable for microcells. The main equation of Hata urban model is modifled by substituting the suburban correction factor with a terrain roughness parameter. This parameter uses a quadratic regression estimator of the standard deviation, ae, of the terrain irregularities along the measuring path, in west of Amman, Jordan. It is shown that RMSE between the predicted and measured data for the new proposed model, is improved by up to 3dB compared to Hata suburban model in most areas under study. Furthermore, the improvement in RMSE increases as ae increases. These results clarify the robustness of the proposed model.