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Radio propagation research helps to deliver green smart environments

24 April 2012

3D ray tracing in central Bristol
Researchers from the Communication Systems & Networks (CSN) Group at the University of Bristol recently presented their work on radiowave propagation for Green Smart Environments at the Barcelona COST IC1004 Action meeting (Feb 2012). This forum addresses research issues in the field of cooperative radio communications to make our society cleaner, safer, and more energy efficient.

This international event addressed how best to exploit the radio channel in the quest for Green Smart Environments (GSEs). Evangelos Mellios, who performed the research, said “our work characterizes the 3D propagation structure and area wide statistics of a heterogeneous mobile broadband network”. The analysis made use of ProPhecy, the CSN Group’s world leading deterministic RF modelling tool. The software is already licensed to a number of industrial partners. Prediction accuracy has been further enhanced in recent years by embedding measured 3D antenna patterns for the basestation and mobile handsets.

the advantage of ProPhecy is its ability to model every building, tree and hill over an area of more than 140 square kilometres

Professor Andrew Nix

Data traffic demands in cellular networks are growing at an alarming rate and significant improvements are now required in the spectral efficiency of mobile broadband networks. The CSN Group is looking to complement the macro layer of a traditional LTE basestation with a number of lower power pico-cell basestations, resulting in an LTE heterogeneous network, or HetNet. This presentation explained that to achieve high capacities in future networks it is necessary to optimise the basestation and mobile handset antennas. The work quantified the impact of antenna pattern and user handset orientations on the HetNet radio channel. GSEs are of growing importance and are expected to be a key component of the Internet of Things.