Performance investigation of different pathloss models for a wireless communication system in Nigeria

Television is an electronic communication system that is capable of transmitting, processing and receiving information by wireless medium. This work is aimed at investigating the performance of selected pathloss models for wireless communication. In this work, two TV stations were considered for investigation. The work presents a field measurement conducted at 645.00 MHz (station 1) and 698.00 MHz (station 2) in Abuja. The measurement were taken for each TV station with a handheld RF field strength spectrum analyzer and a Garmin 72H GPS receiver. In this work, we assessed the performance of ten selected pathloss models and in comparison with pathloss model based on propagation measurements taken from selected TV stations. These pathloss model were subjected to performance metrics: Mean Prediction Error (MPE) and Root Average Squared Prediction Error (RASPE) to ascertain their suitability and applicability in the environment under consideration. The RASPE is the most apparent metric for analyzing error of predictive models. The results of the prediction provide detailed error analysis of the existing pathloss models. The acceptable radio prediction value for TV is 10 dB. The lower the value, the better the performance. Besides, the ten existing prediction models gave RASPE values in excess of 10 dB. Therefore, this translates to the fact that these models do not fully predict the pathloss for TV broadcasting in Abuja.