Clutter Archives

Posted on 2023-02-202023-02-20

Calibrating beyond line of sight RF modelling with field testing

Summary

We field tested our software to improve it for beyond line of sight planning. From analysis of data we have improved diffraction accuracy, clutter profiles and crucially have proven that high resolution LiDAR is not the best choice for beyond line of sight or sub GHz modelling. An RMSE modelling error of 5.2dB was achieved as a result.

Modelling can only be as accurate as the inputs.

Given accurate reference data and accurate RF parameters it can be very accurate but achieving both conditions requires careful and delicate calibration of dozens of variables. Thankfully this time intensive process is only necessary when changing hardware which for most organisations is a cycle measured in years.

The reference data used could be a digital terrain model like SRTM, a digital surface model like ALOS30, high fidelity LiDAR or landcover like ESA Worldcover. As we demonstrate, high resolution does not always translate to high accuracy in beyond line of sight RF.

Calibrating modelling with LiDAR data to match field measurements

LiDAR is great, but it’s not a silver bullet

You can have the most expensive 50cm LiDAR money can buy and still not achieve real world accuracy or a notable gain over 1m or 2m data (unless you’re planning for a model village). LiDAR on its own cannot model beyond line of sight, essential for sub GHz planning, which is a risk we’ll explore when planning tool design is focused on sales and marketing, not actual RF Engineering.

Controversially, you can get better BLOS modelling accuracy with basic terrain data enhanced with calibrated clutter profiles which we’ll demonstrate below.

The best data to use depends on the technology and requirements. LiDAR is unbeatable for line of sight planning, but won’t help you in the woods, or beyond line of sight without a proper physics propagation engine.

Unless your network is composed of static masts eg. Fixed wireless access (FWA), then chances are you are working non line of sight between radios so LiDAR should be used carefully.

Public 1m LiDAR data showing cars, trees and houses

“Line of sight” field testing Feb 2022

Last year we field tested LTE 800MHz in the Peak district and achieved excellent calibration figures for distant hilltop towers looking onto open moorland. This was predictable given the legacy cellular models we used were developed from similar measurements. As the blog described, the harder calibration was inside a wood where the LiDAR data proved unsuitable. Due to the simplistic nature of first return LiDAR, a tree canopy appears as a solid immutable obstacle. You can model the RF as it hits the tree canopy but not where it matters, on the ground inside the trees. This key finding accelerated and matured our developments with tooling to support calibration with survey data in CSV format and user configurable environment profiles.

CSV import utility – developed for analysing field test data

“Non Line of sight” field testing, Feb 2023

This year we field tested LTE 800MHz again but this time in a old Gloucestershire village, Frampton on Severn, where the tower was deliberately obstructed and the solid stone buildings in the village meant we were measuring diffraction, coming from rooftops of single, double and triple storey buildings. The test data was collected from 2 handheld LTE test devices using a combination of Network Signal Guru (NSG) and CellMapper for Android. This app reports signal values and logs cell metadata with locations to a CSV file which we can analyse.

Some variables were unknown such as RF power, which required us to take measurements on the green in full line of sight. These “power readings” allowed us to reverse engineer the cell power as approximately 40dBm (10W) which would be appropriate for a cell serving a village.

Frampton on Severn. The cell tower is to the far right behind the pub.

Received Signal Received Power (RSRP)

The measured power value is Received Signal Received Power (RSRP) which is a LTE dBm value determined by the bandwidth, in this case 10MHz like most LTE Band 20 signals in Europe.

RSRP is lower than the carrier signal (Received Power) which is agnostic to bandwidth, but also measured in dBm.

Be careful not to confuse the two units of measurement as they can vary by more than 27dB!! A carrier signal of -80dBm might have a RSRP of -108dBm or lower depending on bandwidth. RSRP is usable down to -120dBm.

Received power dBm	Bandwidth MHz	RSRP dBm
-70	10	-97.8
-80	10	-107.8
-90	10	-117.8

Relationship between power, bandwidth and RSRP at 10MHz

Diffraction

Diffraction is the effect that occurs when radiation hits an edge like a rooftop or a hilltop. The wavefront radiates from that edge with resulting power determined by several factors like height and wavelength. Much like a game of pool, the angle of incidence determines the angle of reflection so a tall building will cast a long RF shadow before the diffracted signal is available again beyond the shadow. A proper diffraction shadow has soft edges as the RF scatters in all directions. LiDAR data creates sharp shadows, even when trees have no leaves.

The CloudRF service has two diffraction capable CPU and GPU engines which use a proprietary algorithm based upon Huygen’s formula which considers obstacle dimensions and wavelength.

Exaggerated diffraction caused by solid LiDAR

Which propagation model is best for 800MHz?

Most propagation model curves follow similar trajectories but differ by only a modest amount of dB in relation to the impact of an obstacle. The choice of model is therefore less important, in our experience, than getting the obstacle data right so for a cellular base station, you could choose to calibrate against any empirical or deterministic model which supports that frequency. Each model has a reliability margin to help align and tune it. For UHF the advanced (and default) ITM model is preferable as it was designed for NLOS broadcasting with complex diffraction routines. For this test we picked the simpler Egli VHF/UHF model with basic knife edge diffraction since this features in both our CPU and GPU engines, and we want to calibrate both.

What is “accurate”?

The cellular modem used to record power levels has a measurement error of -/+ 3dB so any reading cannot be more accurate than this. Therefore, if calibration of field measurements returns a Root Mean Square (RMSE) value of 8dB, this can be considered to be composed of measurement error and (5dB of) modelling error.

For Line of sight, a modelling error level of < 10dB is ok, < 5dB is good, and < 3dB is excellent. This is the easy part which for some basic tools is enough.

Line of Sight coverage: Good for above UHF only

For non line of sight (which covers much more complex scenarios), the error doubles so an error level of < 20dB is ok, < 10dB is good and < 6dB is excellent.

For our field testing, we achieved a non line of sight calibration with 5.2dB of modelling error which we were content with. We are confident we can improve upon this with richer clutter data which we are developing presently.

Results

1m LiDAR – It isn’t as useful as it looks

Using 1m LiDAR for the village we generated a sharp heatmap sensitive to chimney stacks and even parked vehicles which made for a very crisp result visually but the first-pass correlation with the field measurements showed it was conservative, which arguably is a safe default if you’re unsure.

The reason was a combination of trees and buildings. The village had trees on the green but due to the season, none were in leaf so signals would travel through them with relatively reduced attenuation. The LiDAR data however, regards a tree as a solid obstacle so results in an overly conservative prediction for measurements beyond the trees. Attenuation through buildings is a weakness of LiDAR in 2.5D RF modelling using this raster data.

You can show RF on the roof and if diffraction is calibrated, beyond the diffraction shadow as the signal hits the ground but not within the shadow itself where through-building signals reside.

LiDAR calibration showing a mean error of -1dB and a total RMSE error of 10dB.

The LiDAR result was improved with positive adjustments to the diffraction routine in SLEIPNIR, our CPU engine. As a result, diffraction is slightly more optimistic and the correlation with field measurements was improved.

The best LiDAR score, subtracting 3dB of receiver error was a modelling RMSE of 7.28dB.

DTM and Landcover – Better than LiDAR?

Using 30m DTM with layered 10m Landcover and 2m buildings, sampled at 5m resolution, higher calibration was achieved despite the loss of resolution. The reason is the Landcover offers through-material attenuation which can be adjusted to match field measurements. In this case, the “trees” and “urban” height and attenuation values were manipulated until coverage matched the results with high accuracy.

The best Landcover score, subtracting 3dB of receiver error was a modelling RMSE of 5.22dB.

A / B comparison – LiDAR and Landcover

Using our calibrated settings, we extrapolated coverage out to 3km radius to model the whole cell. Here you can clearly see differences in coverage between the two data sets. With LiDAR, coverage is bouncing off hard tree canopies and casting sharp shadows on obstacles like hedgerows. With Landcover, we still have diffraction but more attenuation from obstacles which creates major nulls and also softer diffraction shadows, set by our clutter profile.

A look forward

Findings from this field testing will be worked back into the CloudRF service in coming days, followed by SOOTHSAYER in due course, as new releases for our SLEIPNIR CPU engine, GPU engine and better default clutter values. We are developing sharper, and economically viable, global clutter data to improve on these scores, but won’t say how just yet 😉

Posted on 2022-06-152022-06-15

System updates – June 2022

We’ve been busy as always improving our service. Here’s a visual roundup of updates we’ve pushed recently for API version 2.9 and UI version 2.8, current as of the 13th June 2022.

For the latest updates click the versions in the corner of the interface.

New features

Variable building heights

Our global building data has had a lot of attention recently from 5G operators and (counter) drone companies.

Previously you could use a mixture of sources to define a building from manipulating your clutter profile values to adding your own as GeoJSON or KML. Our third party buildings which we offer as an enrichment option in the Landcover menu were lacking height data so we used a user defined value from the clutter profiles. For many users on default settings, this resulted in buildings at 6m height, adequate for a suburb with similar architecture but no use for a vertical city like Chicago.

Our building data now has unique heights and we’ve modified our clutter system to match it. Our SLEIPNIR engine could already handle user defined height data due to previous modifications around custom clutter.

In the CloudRF UI, you can define the 9 system codes and only 9 custom codes.

Customers with private servers can define up to 255 clutter codes in clutter files on their system.

Diffraction for 3D clutter

Previously we modelled single knife edge diffraction only for the surface model, and considered through building attenuation for the clutter but now we can do it for clutter.

In the screenshot below, the COST model is used with 3D clutter for a suburb with a treeline along a train track. Both the buildings and trees are displaying diffraction, recognised by a shadow beyond an obstacle which gradually comes back into coverage as the obstacle angle decreases.

DTM option instead of LiDAR

We’ve worked with LiDAR in modelling for years and its great but has its limitations, especially with non line of sight communications where LiDAR will show a strong signal for the roof of a building and produce a very conservative “shadow” immediately behind an obstacle until knife edge diffraction kicks in.

Being conservative in RF planning isn’t a bad thing but with proper building height data we can enable more accurate through-building attenuation in cities, worldwide.

Nothing beats LiDAR for LOS analysis so we’ll still consider requests for uploading public LiDAR but for most of the world where there isn’t LiDAR, we now have an improved solution.

For rooftop planning, we recommend LiDAR but for through building/tree modelling at ground level use calibrated clutter instead. You can enable this option in the Clutter menu.

You can access this mode in the interface “Clutter” menu or in the JSON API with {clm: 2} in the environment object.

Delete-all custom clutter

API users can now delete all their custom clutter by requesting to delete id=0. This will soon be added to the UI with a button.

Added my-metrics endpoint for API usage

We’re now logging metrics for all the analytics APIs which count against your API use. We have an API to generate charts and will soon add client side charts so you can see how your API use breaks down by tool and time.

Automated testing

Testing is a critical part of maintaining our quality of service which is becoming increasingly complex. We’ve added automated workflows to our development environment to help catch bugs earlier and complement the manual interface testing.

This is implemented for the API and UI repositories at the code function level as well as our regular regression testing at the API level and now third party automated exception handling.

Improvements

Conditional terrain smoothing

We’re smoothing terrain for those super sampled locations. For example if you went to Africa which is mostly 30m DTM, and requested a 2m plot, we would be super-sampling the DTM by a factor of 15 which used to result in ugly artefacts on hillsides. We’ve fixed that and are able to have smooth hills and precision 2m clutter in remote areas 🙂

Rwanda with super sampled 30m DTM and 2m buildings with diffraction

Up to 255 clutter codes

In the CloudRF UI, you can define the 9 system codes and only 9 custom codes but the backend system supports up to 255 unique classes of clutter. You set the height and density for each so this could be skyscrapers for a city or crops.

Customers with private servers can define up to 255 clutter codes in clutter files on their system.

Diffraction loss adjusted down by 3dB

Following feedback from Mountain rescue teams using our service who were surprised to find coverage in modelled dead spots, we investigated our diffraction model and found it was too conservative by at least 5dB. We’ve adjusted the loss it applies down by 3dB so it’s now more optimistic, but still cautiously conservative.

Extended southern limit to -89N

You can model on Antarctica now. We don’t have DTM there so it’s flat as far as our service is concerned but if you are using the Satellite tool, this now works on the continent for testing for the horizon on a route etc.

Fixes

Replaced source for 3D buildings from a commercial supplier to Openstreetmap.org
Points requests was failing to handle some responses from the engine
Returning correct HTTP status codes for errors now
Template list is returned as JSON in the UI
Template authentication has been upgraded to the header “key”
Credits balance was reported incorrectly for some API calls
Remote tile fetching was corrupting some local tiles
Sanity check unworkable paths before passing into engine (eg. 1m or 1000km)
Some JSON responses malformed
Splicing of points near the Rx in a points request works better for a figure of 8 route.
Preferences was breaking if no lat or lon set
Performance improvements to “sea tiles” used for offshore planning.
Changed noise floor validation to -130 to -50dBm
Fixed issue with some interference API calls missing id values

Posted on 2021-11-122021-11-12

Enhancing accuracy with environment profiles

In radio planning, accurate terrain data is only half the story.

The other data you need, if you want accurate results, is everything above the surface such as buildings and trees.

This is known as land cover or in radio engineering; clutter data.

Clutter data

In October 2021, the European Space Agency released a global 10m land cover data set called WorldCover with 9 clutter bands.

In our opinion, the ESA data is a sharp improvement on a similar ESRI/Microsoft 10m land cover data set also published this year.

The land cover can be used to enhance coarse 30m data sets to distinguish between homes and gardens, or crops and rivers. It’s space mapped so has every recent substantial building unlike community building datasets which can be patchy outside of Europe.

This data was previously very expensive. A price reflected in the eye watering pricing of legacy Windows^TM planning tools.

The data has 9 bands which have been mapped to 9 land cover codes in Cloud-RF^TM. Combined with our recent 9 custom clutter bands, we have 18 unique bands of clutter which you can use simultaneously.

Read more about the codes in the documentation here.

Explore the data we have on the ESA WorldCover viewer application here:

https://viewer.esa-worldcover.org/worldcover/

Custom clutter enrichment

We have integrated the 10m data into our SLEIPNIR^TM propagation engine which as of version 1.5, can work with third party and custom clutter tiles simultaneously, in different resolutions.

This is significant as it means you can have a 30m DSM base layer, enhanced with a 10m land cover layer, enriched further with a 2m building which you created yourself. Effectively this gives you a 10m global base accuracy with potential for 2m accuracy if you add custom obstacles. The interface will let you upload multiple items as a GeoJSON or KML file.

Demo 1 – The Jungle

Always a tricky environment to communicate in, and model accurately due to dense tree canopies. In this demo, a remote region of the Congo has been selected at random for a portable VHF radio on 75MHz with a 3km planning radius.

This area has 30m DSM which out of the box produces an unrealistic plot resembling undulating flat terrain. This is because the thick tree canopy is represented as hard ground and the signal is diffracting along as if it were bare earth. The result therefore is that 3km is possible in all directions.

By adding our “Tropical.clt” clutter profile, calibrated for medium height, dense trees, we get a very different view which shows the effective range through the trees to be closer to 1km, or less, with much better coverage down the river basin, due to the lack of obstructions.

Demo 2 – A region without LiDAR

Scotland has very poor public LiDAR compared with England which has good coverage at 1m and 2m.

For this demo, Stirling was chosen which has 30m DSM only. A cell tower on a hill serving the town produces an optimistic view of coverage by default but when enhanced with a “Temperate.clt” clutter profile, calibrated for solid and tall town houses and pine forests (eg. > 50N, Northern Europe, Northern USA) we get a much more conservative prediction. As a bonus, the base resolution has improved three fold to 10m.

Demo 3 – A region with 2m LiDAR

You might think if you’ve got high resolution LiDAR data that’s enough. Wrong. Soft obstacles like trees especially will produce excessive diffraction as if they were spiky terrain. This manifests itself as optimistic ‘great’ coverage due to the diffraction coverage. By adding our “Temperate.clt” profile again we make trees absorb power and see where there are nulls in our coverage – beyond the houses and woods.

Despite our land cover being only 10m resolution, we are able to benefit from the full LiDAR resolution with 2m accuracy.

Inspecting a profile

The path profile tool will now show you colour coded land cover as well as custom clutter and 3D buildings. Crops are yellow, grass is green(!), Trees are dark green, built-up areas are red, 3D buildings are grey, water is blue…

The most significant feature in this image isn’t the coloured land cover, or the custom building (as both are features we’ve done before), or the fact we know the tidal river Severn sits lower than the man-made Canal beside it, It’s the fact that both are being used in the same model at the same time. They are different sources, different resolutions, different densities…

Path profile for 860m link showing 2m LiDAR, 10m Land cover and 2m custom building

Using and editing a profile

Once you’ve got the hang of switching profiles you may find it needs optimising for your region. With the clutter manager in the web interface, premium customers can create their own profile based on field measurements for highly accurate predictions. After all no two forests or neighbourhoods are the same density.

Create your perfect profile and save it to your account. The system has 5 regional profiles ready for all users and you can add your own.

To use them, pick from the Clutter > Profile menu and ensure “Landcover” is set to “Enabled”.

If you have created custom clutter and want to use that, set Custom clutter to “Enabled” to blend it in.

For more see the web interface clutter section in the documentation.

Using clutter from the API

We played with a few designs before settling on this very simple template method where you set a profile within the environment menu as follows. This is a new value “clt” and you can still use the existing “cll” and “clm” values to manage the system clutter and custom clutter layers.

JSON request excerpt for a temperate “European” profile, with custom clutter, with 3D buildings and a 3D building density of 0.25dB/m

  "environment": {
        "clt": "Temperate.clt",
        "clm": 1,
        "cll": 2,
        "mat": 0.25
    },

Example for Jungle profile, without custom clutter, without 3D buildings.

  "environment": {
        "clt": "Jungle.clt",
        "clm": 0,
        "cll": 1,
        "mat": 0
    },

What’s next?

Now that we have highly configurable environment profiles. it’s time to tune them with field testing. We’ve bought a heap of comms equipment and will be using it to optimise these profiles with real world measurements.

Posted on 2021-06-112021-06-13

RF penetration demonstration

During infantry training, soldiers are shown firsthand the impact of different weapons upon different materials to help them make better decisions about good cover versus bad cover. Spoiler: The railway sleeper doesn’t make it 🙁

As tactical radios have moved several hundred megahertz up the spectrum from their cold-war VHF roots, material attenuation is a serious issue which needs demonstrating to enable better route selection and siting. Unlike shooting at building materials it’s hard to visualise invisible radio signals, and therefore teach good siting, but equally important as ground based above-VHF signals are easily blocked in urban environments.

This blog provides a visual demonstration of the physical relationship between different wavelengths and attenuating obstacles only. It does not compare modulation schemas, multi-path, radios or technologies.

Bricks and wavelengths

Clutter data refers to obstacles above the ground such as trees and buildings. Cloud-RF has 9 classes of clutter data within the service which you can use and build with. Each class (Bricks +) has a different attenuation rate measured in decibels per metre (dB/m). This rate is a nominal value based upon the material density and derived from the ITU-R P.833-7 standard and empirical testing with broadcast signals in European homes.

A signal can only endure a limited amount of attenuation before it is lost into the noise floor. In free space attenuation is minimal but with obstacles it can be substantial. This is why a Wi-Fi router in a window can be hard to use within another room in the house but the same router is detectable from a hill a mile away.

The attenuation rate is an average based upon a hollow building with solid walls.

Common building materials attenuate signals to different amounts based on their density and the signals wavelength.

A higher wavelength signal such as L band (1-2GHz) will be attenuated more than VHF (30-300MHz) for example.

A long wavelength signal like HF will suffer minimal attenuation making it better suited to communicating through multiple brick walls.

The layer cake house

A brick house is not just brick. It’s bricks, concrete blocks, glass, insulation, stud walls, furniture and surfaces of varying absorption and reflection characteristics. Modelling every building material and multi-path precisely, is possible, given enough data and time due to the exponential complexity of multi-path but wholly impractical.

A trade-off for accurate urban modelling is to assign a local attenuation value. It’s local since building regulations vary by country and era so a 1930s brick house in the UK has different characteristics to a 1960s timber house in Germany. Taking the brick house we can identify the nominal value by adding up the materials and dividing it by the size.

For example, 2 x solid 10dB brick walls plus a 5 dB margin for interior walls and furniture would be 25dB. Divide this by a 10m size and you have 2.5dB/m. Using some local empirical testing you can quickly refine this for useful value for an entire city (assuming consistent architecture) but in reality the *precise* value will vary by each property, even on a street of the same design, due to interior layouts and furniture.

Range setup

We created nine 4 metre tall targets using each of the 9 clutter classes in attenuation order from left-to-right, measuring 10x10m and fired radio-bullets^TM at them from a distance of 300m using the same RF power of 1W.

The following bands were compared: HF 20MHz, VHF 70MHz, UHF 700MHz, UHF 1200MHz, UHF 2.4GHz. SHF 5.8GHz.

The ITU-R P.525 model was used to provide a consistent reference.

Only the stronger direct-ray is modelled. Multipath effects mean that reflections will reach into some of the displayed null zones, with an inherent reflection loss for each bounce, but these are nearly impossible to model accurately and in a practical time.

Here are the results.

HF 20MHz

VHF 70MHz

UHF 700MHz

UHF 1200MHz

UHF 2.4GHz

SHF 5.8GHz

Findings

Dense materials, especially concrete, attenuates higher frequency signals more than natural materials like trees
Lower UHF signals perform much better than SHF with the same power
Higher frequencies with low power can be blocked by a single house, even after only 300m
HF eats bricks for breakfast!

Summary

Modern tactical UHF radios, and their software eco-systems, are unrecognisable from their cold-war VHF ‘voice only’ ancestors in terms of capabilities but have an Achilles heel in the form of material penetration. To get the best coverage the network density must be flexed to match the neighbourhood.

This is obvious when comparing rolling terrain with a urban environment but the building materials and street sizes in the urban environment will make a significant difference too. Ground units which communicated effectively in a city in one country may find the same tactics and working ranges ineffective in another city with the same radios and settings. Understanding the impact of material penetration will help planning and communication.

Posted on 2020-01-202021-05-22

DIY clutter

In this video, a Port in west Africa poorly served by high resolution data is enhanced with DIY clutter. The result shows substantial attenuation from the shipping containers which due to their dynamic nature would not be current in commercial data.

Summary

High quality clutter data is necessary for accurate radio planning but it’s not always available when and where you need it. Using the new ‘My clutter’ feature at CloudRF you can define your own and use it in seconds. The data can be layered on top of existing data, regardless of resolution, to enhance accuracy with material attenuation conforming to ITU standards for forests.

Clutter data

Clutter data in modelling refers to objects on the earth’s surface. In radio this is typically buildings and trees which attenuate signals. These must be factored in to deliver accurate predictions. It’s normally very expensive and the market for this data is worth billions due to demand by global telecommunications firms. This puts it out of reach of most small businesses and organisations.

Material attenuation

Different materials attenuate RF in different ways. The impact depends upon the wavelength (eg. WiFi can’t go through thick walls) and the material (concrete absorbs more RF than wood). For more on this subject see the land cover blog here.

How

Use the form in the ‘Model’ menu to either define your own polygons and lines or upload your own bulk clutter as a KML file containing polygons.

Why

Here’s a few reasons why DIY clutter is necessary:

Based on market pricing it would cost over a billion dollars to purchase ‘commercial’ clutter data for the earth.
Based on experience, the lead time for clutter in Africa can be 6 weeks.
The expensive clutter data is out of date by the time you buy it. Shipping containers, construction, transport will change and they affect RF coverage.
Commercial clutter data doesn’t let you model future construction projects eg. a new building

Posted on 2020-01-182021-05-22

Modelling trees and buildings

Land Cover or ‘clutter’ data describes obstacles on the earth’s surface a radio wave will have to negotiate like trees or buildings. The Land cover data is layered on top of the terrain data which can be either a smooth(er) Digital Terrain Model (DTM) or a rougher ground-with-clutter ‘Digital Surface Model’ (DSM) . For DTM and DSM this will allow you to simulate attenuation from a forest or city where it might not otherwise be represented in the data resulting in much more accurate results. It also means you can enhance basic coarse terrain data with fresh high resolution land cover to reflect recent construction developments.

Obstacles and attenuation

Radio waves are attenuated differently by different materials like vegetation and man-made buildings. The impact varies by frequency with very short wavelength signals like WiGig at 60GHz struggling to penetrate a paper wall whilst a long wavelength VHF signal can breeze through multiple brick walls. For accurate modelling its essential that land cover is considered otherwise you run a risk of an unrealistic prediction which will bear little resemblance to real world results.

Trees

Trees attenuate differently with dense coniferous pine forests attenuating the most. An ITU standard, ITU-R P.833-7 “Attenuation in Vegetation” exists to describe the impact of a forest of different signals. There have been many academic studies into this subject but the summary of this standard for a mixed deciduous/coniferous forest is as follows:

Frequency MHz	Attenuation dB/m
106	0.04
466	0.12
949	0.17
1852	0.3
2118	0.34

No two forests are the same but if you err on the side of caution you can budget for their impact with a rule of thumb that 10m of mixed forest is equivalent to 2dB of attenuation at 1GHz, 4dB at 2GHz and 8dB at 4GHz. Trees are defined in the Land cover used by the system with attenuation values aligned to ITU-R P.833-7 which scale with wavelength so the same forest block will attenuate a WiFi signal more than a PMR446 signal. The resolution varies by region with 30m for CONUS, 100m for Europe and 500m for the rest of the world.

Buildings

Man-made buildings are even less predictable due to the variety in size, density and materials used. Many studies have been conducted into building attenuation but they are region specific due to construction materials and designs. A good reference is a UK paper by OFCOM which merges multiple research papers and has a useful table of attenuation by material and frequency on page 39.

Material	Attenuation dB/m at 1GHz	Attenuation dB/m at 10GHz
Concrete	24	>50
Brick	32	32
Plasterboard	11	>50
Wood	5	>50
Glass	3	44
Ceiling board	1	10
Chipboard	22	>50
Floorboard	4	>50

The system currently has four classes of building attenuation for high to low intensity developments. The attenuation rate is 1% of the solid material attenuation rate (eg. Brick is 32dB/m so a brick house in CloudRF is 0.32dB/m) since most buildings are largely hollow.

Land cover data

To enhance DTM and DSM models with 3D clutter, Land Cover data can be layered on top of the terrain to apply representative attenuation. This Land Cover data has been sourced from a variety of sources with up to 30m resolution. The total possible resolution possible is determined by the highest resolution data so if you are in New York City for example where there is 2m LIDAR / DSM data available, your effective resolution will be 2m.

30m Digital surface model	30m Digital surface model plus 30m land cover
2m Digital surface model (LIDAR)	2m Digital surface model (LIDAR) plus 30m land cover

Propagation models

Propagation models vary in complexity from the simple ‘one liners’ like the free-space-path-loss model to the incredibly complex Irregular Terrain / Longley Rice model. Most models are simple and must be used within their parameter limits (especially with empirical ‘measured’ models) otherwise you could get wildly inaccurate results. A good example is the well known Hata model which was designed for elevated cellular base stations serving mobile subscribers which were lower than it. If you use this model at the bottom of a hill you can get some incredibly unlikely results as the simple model has no concept of terrain only A to B. By using Land cover, the output from these simple models can be enhanced greatly to provide a result which is sensitive to changes in the terrain along a given path, similar to how the ITM model works.

	A UHF repeater at the foot of some hills with 20m DSM only. By default the Sleipnir engine will restrict coverage to line-of-sight for simple models like Hata.
	With knife-edge-diffraction enabled, the Hata coverage is free to roam beyond line-of-sight. The coverage becomes very optimistic to the west up in the hills as Hata has no concept of terrain and expects a clear shot from the base station to the mobile station.
	With knife-edge and 30m Land cover enabled, the optimistic Hata coverage is still free to roam beyond line-of-sight but is now severely constrained by the dense forests and urban developments without modifying the model itself.

Forest example

Modelling little forest blocks far away from your tower is easy with accurate DSM data but modelling a huge forest where your tower is within it is a harder problem. Heights are all defined as relative to the ground so if you have a 10m tall forest which is represented as raised earth in a DSM model and your tower is 12m tall you will end up with a tower which is in fact 22m above the ground – not ideal! Instead, when working with the 30m DSM you should define your height as the height above the canopy which is 2m. Here’s a comparison using 30m DSM and 30m Land cover in west Virginia.

Free space path loss prediction for an outdoor WiFi router, 30m DSM.

30m DSM plus 30m Land cover.

Urban example

To demonstrate the attenuation of buildings, this example has an emitter (LTE eNodeB on 800MHz) equidistant between a city and some countryside. The attenuation of the urban land cover becomes obvious once applied which contrasts with the open fields and water.

Free space path loss prediction for an LTE eNodeB, 30m DSM

Free space path loss prediction for an LTE eNodeB, 30m DSM with 30m Land cover

Summary

Land cover is essential for accurate planning and is now supported at 30m resolution. Coupled with high resolution data like 2m LIDAR, you can now accurately model attenuation of different materials in a cluttered environment. More land cover data is planned for the near future along with an upgraded ‘my clutter’ interface to allow you to define your own forests or housing developments for areas where data may not be available.