Artificial Neural Network Based Path Loss Prediction for Wireless Communication Network

Accurate path loss (PL) prediction is essential for predicting transmitter coverage and optimizing wireless network performance. Traditional PL models are difficult to cope with the development trend of diversity, time-varying and mass wireless channels. In this work, the most widely used multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network in artificial neural network (ANN) is employed to accurately predict PL. Three types of environmental features are defined and extracted, which describe the propagation environment only by considering limited environmental types instead of complex 3D environment modeling. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to generate the low-dimensional environmental features, and eliminate redundant information among similar environmental types. Moreover, the information of base station (BS) and the receiver (Rx), including 3D locations, frequency, the transmitted power of BS, the antenna information, the feeder loss, and the received power of all the locations are obtained from the measurements. Different environmental features are combined with the information of BS and Rx to construct seven datasets for PL prediction models based on MLP neural networks. The impacts of the number of neurons in the hidden layer, the number of hidden layers, the number of training samples, and environmental features on PL prediction models are explored by considering the absolute value of mean error (AME), the mean absolute error (MAE), the standard deviation (STD) of error, the correlation coefficient, and the time ratio, respectively. This work aims to understand the propagation characteristics of radio waves, which can provide a theoretical basis for wireless network optimization and communication system design.