Propagation path loss models are useful for the prediction of received signal strength at a given distance from the transmitter; estimation of radio coverage areas of Base Transceiver Stations (BTS); frequency assignments; interference analysis; handover optimisation; and power level adjustments. Due to the differences in: environmental structures; local terrain profiles; and weather conditions, path loss prediction model for a given environment using any of the existing basic empirical models such as the Okumura-Hata's model has been shown to differ from the optimal empirical model appropriate for such an environment. In this paper, propagation parameters, such as distance between transmitting and receiving antennas, transmitting power and terrain elevation, using sea level as reference point, were used as inputs to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for the development of an ANN based path loss model. Data were acquired in a drive test through selected rural and suburban routes in Minna and environs as dataset required for training ANN model. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) network parameters were varied during the performance evaluation process, and the weight and bias values of the best performed MLP network were extracted for the development of the ANN based path loss models for two different routes, namely rural and suburban routes. The performance of the developed ANN based path loss model was compared with some of the existing techniques and modified techniques. Using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) obtained between the measured and the model outputs as a measure of performance, the newly developed ANN based path loss model performed better than the basic empirical path loss models considered such as: Hata; Egli; COST-231; Ericsson models and modified path loss approach.
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