Lidar Derived Digital Twins for Urban Next Generation Network Planning

Accurate propagation modeling is important to network planning in urban environments, especially for signals in the super high frequency (SHF) band, that will experience severe attenuation due to obstruction and clutter loss. Traditional methods were designed for long-range links, and do not scale well to the high resolution required to fully capture an urban environment. Contemporary methods that utilize full 3D models of the environment require costly 3D ray tracing computations. This paper proposes a method by which a geographical digital twin is created once from LiDAR data for a given area of interest, allowing varying topologies to be simulated in this area with high efficiency. Results were comparable to those generated with the standard DSM-based method, with a 1.59 dBm higher mean absolute error and a 3 4. 9 % increase in link estimation rate. While initial results fall in line with those generated using standard methods, the additional information provided by the proposed digital twin will allow future iterations to account for additional propagation effects that cannot be captured with the standard method, which may result in higher accuracy link estimations.