Experimental Study of Variation of Path Loss with Respect to Heights at GSM Frequency Band

In wireless channels, path loss has a strong impact on the quality of the links and hence there is need for accurate estimation for the efficient design of GSM networks. In this paper, measurements campaign were conducted at different floor using the GSM frequencies 900MHz and 1800MHz in the tallest building in Tropical Africa (Cocoa house) located in Ibadan metropolis. Cost-231 and Erickson path loss models were used to predict path losses with respect to receiver heights at different floors and the accuracy of the experimental results was estimated by determine the MSE between the measured and estimated path loss. The lower frequency suffers less path loss with varying heights compared to higher frequency with mean path loss 70.25dBm and 77.44dBm respectively. The comparative analysis revealed that the mean square error (MSE) for Cost-231 and Erickson were 1.25dB and 3.37dB respectively. The results shows that Cost-231 is the most accurate and reliable path loss prediction model for urban area (Ibadan) with varying heights. The results is also in good agreement with the acceptable international standard range 1≤μ≤15dB.