Efficient Integration of Street Clutter Into mm-Wave Ray Tracing in Urban Environments Based on More Than 1000 Measurements

Ray Tracers (RTs) are widely used tools to simulate wireless communication channels. For high-frequency bands (e.g., mm-waves), RT using only building databases overpredicts parameters such as path gain in Line of Sight (LoS) urban canyons environments due to the lack of accounting for street clutter effects, primarily foliage. This work presents a systematic measurement-based modeling treatment for incorporating clutter into classical RT simulations, including homogeneous absorbing volumes, reflection coefficient, and clutter loss definition. Ten different configurations were tested for the added volumes, an extensive evaluation against a measurement dataset of over 1000 links and 150,000 power samples was done to validate the statistical robustness of the approach. Path gain root-mean-square error (RMSE) between fits based on RT and measurement samples from 11 different routes in Manhattan, New York, were reduced from 12.5 dB to 6.6 dB by including street-clutter effects, while 3GPP LoS model results in 9.8 dB RMSE.