Patent ID: 6947708

Claim:
A method of estimating in an anticipatory manner radio coverage of a cell of a cellular, wireless telephone network, by using a radio station for managing the traffic of the cell and a database of a relief map specifying positions of salients in the cell and what the salients are, the method being performed with a computation system, the computation system performing the following steps: (a) simulate transmission into the cell of a sampling beam that renders the conditions of radioelectric propagation along an initial segment of a path from an initial position and along one direction and in specific conditions of propagation, (b) compare the path segment with the data of the relief map to identify the position and the nature of a salient at any instantaneous incidence site of the path segment by responding to the database, (c) determine, according to the data for the salient specified in the database, new propagation conditions on a downstream path segment beyond the incidence site, (d) iterate as called for by steps (b) and (c) a given number of times for other downstream path segments, (e) determine, according to the propagation conditions along an entire path between a transmitter and a receiver, a cumulative attenuation for any selected site of the path, (f) repeat steps (a)-(e) a plurality of times for a plurality of initial directions to sample the entire cell and thereby ascertain a map of attenuations of the selected sites, (g) during an initial phase: (i) devise the database as a direct-access matrix of local and independent specification of the positions and kinds of the respective salients of a plurality of predetermined meshes of a corresponding mesh topology of the map, and (ii) store the geographic-orientation data of the salients in the matrix database, (h) during an operational phase (i) compare the position of the instantaneous site with the meshing topology to identify an incidence mesh, (ii) following identification of an incidence, compute post-incidence propagation conditions from the local and independent salient specification data of the incidence mesh, and (iii) compute one direction of the reflected beam of a downstream segment based on the orientation data.