Home
Method and apparatus for a transportable environmental database
Contents
1. System for Creating a Computer Model and Measurement Database of a Wireless Communication Network filed by T S Rappaport and R R Skidmore and assigned to a common assignee the subject matter of which is incorporated herein by reference DESCRIPTION BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 0002 1 Field of the Invention 0003 The present invention generally relates to database development using computer aided design and more par ticularly to manipulating data from any environment in the world e g cities buildings campuses floors within a building objects in an outdoor setting etc to construct an electronic building database that can be used to generate definitions of the user s building and site parameters and used with wireless communication system modeling and engineering planning products 0004 2 Background Description 0005 As wireless communications use increases radio frequency RF coverage within buildings and signal pen etration into buildings from outside transmitting sources has quickly become an important design issue for wireless engineers who must design and deploy cellular telephone systems paging systems or new wireless systems and technologies such as personal communication networks or wireless local area networks Designers are frequently requested to determine if a radio transceiver location or base station cell site can provide reliable service throughout an entire city an office building ar
2. in X and Y directions 0058 Cursor Snap command This command prompts the user with Snap spacing or ON OFF Aspect Rotate Style lt 0 5000 gt 0059 Spacing Activates Snap mode with the specified value 0060 ON Activates Snap mode using the current snap grid resolution rotation and style 0061 OFF Turns off Snap mode but retains the values and modes 0062 Aspect Specifies differing X and Y spacing for the snap grid This option is not available if the current snap style is Isometric 0063 Rotate Sets the rotation of the snap grid with respect to the drawing and the display screen The user specifies a rotation angle between 90 and 90 degrees A positive angle rotates the grid counter clockwise about its base point A negative angle rotates the grid clockwise 0064 Base point lt current gt The user specifies a point 0065 Rotation angle current gt The user speci fies an angle 0066 Style The user specifies the format of the Snap grid which is standard or isometric 0067 Standard Displays a rectangular grid that is parallel to the XY plane of the current Universal Coordinate System of the drawing database X and Y spacing may differ 0068 Isometric Displays an isometric grid in which the grid points are initially at 30 and 150 degree angles Isometric snap can be rotated but cannot have different Aspect values 0069 Object Selection Snap command This com man
3. prompts said user to enter missing information before proceeding 9 A method as recited in claim 1 wherein said formatted data comprises at least one vectorized drawing of said environment 10 An apparatus for manipulating data from any envi ronment in the world to construct a database that can be used to generate definitions of the user s physical environment including buildings terrain and other site parameters com prising means for creating and formatting a plurality of objects defining an environment of floors walls partitions buildings building complexes or compounds terrain foliage or other sites or obstructions and means for generating a set of formatted data in a form transportable to and usable by an engineering planning model or other application 11 An apparatus as recited in claim 10 further compris ing a means for verifying the sufficiency of said plurality of objects to ensure a useful definition of said environment and notifying a user of results of said verification of sufficiency 12 An apparatus as recited in claim 10 further compris ing a means for inputting existing data vectors or drawing objects said existing data vectors or drawing objects either partially or fully describing said environment
4. nature when the formatting of a drawing is completed the resulting drawing is a true three dimensional environment The user can see the three dimensional build ing structure by altering the viewpoint 0101 The present invention can be used to create single floor drawings that can later be assembled into one multi floored drawing or it can be used to create one or several multi floored drawings all at once After creating a single floor all entities that are not partitions should be removed from the drawing Thus if a raster image was used as a reference for tracing partitions it should be erased once the tracing is complete The method provides assistance to the user to distinguish between partition and non partition objects Typically objects referred to as formatted objects are partition objects and objects referred to as unformatted objects are non partition objects 0102 The final stage of formatting a drawing involves several verification steps These steps are automatically sequenced as described above Before each step is per formed the user is asked whether that step has yet been performed If the user answers Yes then that step is skipped and the user is asked about the next step Otherwise the current step is performed and the user is prompted for any necessary information When all steps have been com pleted the drawing is saved Unnecessary drawing informa tion should then be purged The formatted drawing sh
5. the invention 0015 FIG 2 isa representation of a typical building floor plan 0016 FIG 3 is a representation of a raster image of a house 0017 FIG 4 is flow diagram of a method for generating drawings from pre existing computer aided design CAD drawings 0018 FIG 5 is a flow diagram of a method for creating a drawing without pre existing information 0019 FIG 6A is a flow diagram of a method for gen erating drawings from pre existing raster images to be used only with distant dependent wireless system performance prediction models 0020 FIG 6B is a flow diagram of a method for gener ating drawings from pre existing raster images to be used with any number of wireless system performance prediction models and US 2004 0186847 A1 0021 FIGS 7A through 7F show examples of methods for snapping an object to a grid or other desired location on a drawing DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF A PREFERRED EMBODIMENT OF THE INVENTION 0022 The present invention is used to build databases for use with modeling and engineering planning and automated design products The current embodiment permits repeat able reproduceable computer representation that may be transported or exported into many standard file formats and is designed specifically for use with the SitePlanner suite of products available from Wireless Valley Communications Inc of Blacksburg Va However it will be apparent to one skilled in the art that the m
6. Format TIFF Targa format TGA PICT and Postscript and wherein said vector files are selected from the group consisting of AutoCAD DWG AutoDesk DXF and Windows MetaFile WMF 4 A method as recited in claim 1 said method further comprising the step of rendering a three dimensional view of said environment wherein said step of rendering a Sep 23 2004 three dimensional view may be performed at any time after at least one of said plurality of objects has been created 5 A method as recited in claim 4 wherein said rendering step includes the step of selecting a three dimensional view of a selected perspective of said environment 6 A method as recited in claim 1 wherein step a further comprises the step of adjusting partition colors and physical and electrical descriptions of said partitions 7 A method as recited in claim 1 wherein said formatted data defines said environment and each said object is asso ciated with at least one of the group consisting of a specific location in said environment an attenuation factor a color a height a surface roughness value and a reflectivity value 8 A method as recited in claim 1 wherein step b automatically prompts a user to verify that each piece of necessary information to define said environment has been added to said definition of said environment before execut ing the verification of said each piece of necessary infor mation and if said user answers in the negative
7. OR ATTACH RASTER IMAGE IMPORT SCALE IMAGE VERIFY DRAWING FIG 6A SET CURRENT FLOOR ATTACH RASTER IMAGE SCALE IMAGE TRACE IMAGE VERIFY DRAWING FIG 6B Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 7 of 8 US 2004 0186847 Endpoint _ snaps to the closest endpoint of an entity Selection point snap point FIG 7A Midpoint Snaps to the midpoint of an entity Selection point snap point FIG B Perpendicular Selection point snap point FIG C Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 8 of 8 US 2004 0186847 Node Snaps to a point object selection and snap points FIG D Intersection cay ion snap point point FIG 7E Apparent intersection Sah N poin selection point selection 4 point FIG 7F US 2004 0186847 A1 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR A TRANSPORTABLE ENVIRONMENTAL DATABASE FOR COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK MANAGEMENT AND ENGINEERING CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS 0001 This application is related to concurrently filed applications Serial No entitled Method and Sys tem for Managing a Real Time Bill of Materials filed by T S Rappaport and R R Skidmore Docket 256016 and Ser No entitled Method and System for Auto mated Optimization of Antenna Positioning in 3 D filed by T S Rappaport and R R Skidmore Docket 256017AA and copending application Ser No 09 221 985 entitled
8. Tracking in Urban Environments MPRG Technical Report MPRG TR 95 14 Sep 15 1995 27 pp US 2004 0186847 A1 Virginia Tech Blacksburg by T S Rappaport M P Koushik M Ahmed C Carter B Newhall and N Zhang Use of Topographic Maps with Building Information to Determine Antenna Placement for Radio Detection and Tracking in Urban Environments MPRG Technical Report MPRG TR 95 19 November 1995 184 pp Virginia Tech Blacksburg by M Ahmed K Blankenship C Carter P Koushik W Newhall R Skidmore N Zhang and T S Rappaport A Comprehensive In Building and Microcellu lar Wireless Comrnunications System Design Tool MPRG TR 97 13 June 1997 122 pp Virginia Tech Blacksburg by R R Skidmore and T S Rappaport Pre dicted Path Loss for Rosslyn MPRG TR 94 20 Dec 9 1994 19 pp Virginia Tech Blacksburg by S Sandhu P Koushik and T S Rappaport Predicted Path Loss for Rosslyn Va Second set of predictions for ORD Project on Site Specific Propagation Prediction MPRG TR 95 03 Mar 5 1995 51 pp Virginia Tech Blacksburg by S Sandhu P Koushik and T S Rappaport These papers and technical reports are illustrative of the state of the art in site specific propagation modeling and show the difficulty in obtaining databases for city environments such as Rosslyn Virginia While the above papers describe a research com parison of measured vs predicted signal coverage the wor
9. ands from AutoCAD a product of AutoDesk Inc of San Rafael Calif It would be apparent to one skilled in the art that any other vectorized drawing tool either now known or to be invented could be used as an alternative in the practice of the present invention The process of inputting and converting the environmental information into a database is referred to as formatting The present invention facilitates the format ting of objects in a drawing and also stores detailed infor mation in the drawing database about the object s location attenuation factor color and other physical and electrical information such as reflectivity or intersections of the object with floors ceilings and other objects 0047 The present invention may scan and format envi ronmental information if a vector drawing of the environ ment does not exist If formatted vector drawings do exist the method of the invention provides many ways for these drawings to be formatted into a useful format Generally two starting points exist when working with vector draw ings These starting points are briefly discussed in the following bulleted list 0048 Starting with a previously drawn CAD floor plan and 0049 Starting from scratch 0050 In order to create a vectorized drawing of a desired environment it is desired to utilize a number of drawing tools The present method provides the user with a wide range of commands which have been crafted for r
10. apid database creation and manipulation as described below Many of these commands rely on specific combinations of AutoCAD drawing commands which are sequentially executed without the user having to know the specific CAD commands It should be apparent to one skilled in art that the method for creating drawings as described below could be practiced with other products either now known or to be developed in the future 0051 View Formatted Information command This command invokes a list box that contains a list of formatted floors in a drawing 0052 Hide Formatted Information command This command allows a user to hide partitions that have been previously formatted 0053 View Unformatted Information command This command works in a similar manner as the View Formatted Information command A list box of available layers in the drawing that are not formatted layers is displayed 0054 Toggle Orthogonal Draw On Off command With the default cursor snap setup ORTHO mode ON constrains cursor movement to horizontal and vertical directions 90 degrees 0055 Display Grid command This command allows the user to specify grid spacing or to turn on off snap and aspect options It also allows the user to specify the spacing value between grid lines The user may turn the grid on or off 0056 Snap Sets the grid spacing to the current snap interval Sep 23 2004 0057 Aspect Sets the grid to a different spacing
11. as United States US 20040186847A1 a Patent Application Publication Pub No US 2004 0186847 A1 Rappaport et al 43 Pub Date Sep 23 2004 54 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR A TRANSPORTABLE ENVIRONMENTAL DATABASE FOR COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK MANAGEMENT AND ENGINEERING 76 Inventors Theodore S Rappaport Blacksburg VA US Roger R Skidmore Blacksburg VA US Correspondence Address WHITHAM CURTIS amp CHRISTOFFERSON P C 11491 SUNSET HILLS ROAD SUITE 340 RESTON VA 20190 US 21 Appl No 10 809 687 22 Filed Mar 26 2004 Related U S Application Data 63 Continuation of application No 09 318 841 filed on May 26 1999 Publication Classification GN MEC haa nenk n GO6F 7 00 Ge US aaa AAEN 707 101 57 ABSTRACT A Building Database Manipulator to build databases for a variety of physical environments including definitions of buildings terrain and other site parameters by scanning in or rapidly editing data Raster scans may be entered or object files in various formats may be used as input Detailed information is stored in the drawing database about the object s location radio frequency attenuation color and other physical information such as electrical characteristics and intersections of the object with the ground floors ceilings and other objects when objects are formatted in a drawing The formatting process is strictly two dimensional in nature but the resul
12. cal dimension of an obstruction partition category has not been inadvertently specified incorrectly and provides a unique perspective that is ultimately useful when viewing wireless prediction or measurement data for evaluation of the performance of the communication system being modeled 0043 Once an environment has been specified and defined as objects and a visual verification of the 3D drawing is complete a full verification of this definition is performed in step 104 as shown in FIG 1 The engineer or designer selects the Final Drawing Check procedure to ensure that all of the steps necessary to create a fully functional model of the desired building environment have been correctly performed These steps include ensuring that the modeled environment is properly scaled and that the separate floors of the building are visually aligned in 3D space Certain drawing structures and information can also be automatically detected For example the number of floors in a given building the number and types of obstruction partition categories and the entities assigned to each type whether or not the user has already verified the drawing previously and what if any activity has been done to the drawing database by the other SitePlanner tool suite mem bers can be automatically detected and reported to the user 0044 To obtain wireless system performance predictions using data generated with the present invention as disclosed in the concur
13. ch new entity the category again defines the vertical dimension given to the entity 0041 Each building floor can itself be thought of as a category that encapsulates the obstruction partition catego ries defined by the user Each floor of a building has an associated ceiling height Alternatively entire buildings may be represented with a building height For the case of a multifloor building the ceiling heights given to each floor in a building defines the vertical separation between them Thus the ceiling height parameter of a given floor is used to correctly position vertically in space each entity located on the floor relative to the entities located on other floors of the building 0042 Once the height of a given obstruction partition category and or the ceiling height of a given floor is Sep 23 2004 adjusted the 3D structure or the drawing database is altered automatically as appropriate This is a major improvement over other 3D techniques simply from a speed and ease of use point of view It is much easier to construct a building in 2D using lines and polygons whose vertical dimension is handled automatically as in the present invention than to model the same building in 3D using slanted or vertical planes as is done in other systems such as suggested in the Radio Propagation and Achievable Accuracy papers cited above The 3D view enables the user to verify the building structure i e that the verti
14. d All objects may be purged at once or the user can select a category of object to purge such as Linetypes Text Styles Dimension Styles Multiline Styles Blocks and Shapes 0077 Drawing Utilities command This command allows the user to audit the drawing or recover from a corrupted drawing 0078 Referring now to FIG 4 if the user starts with a previously drawn CAD drawing the following steps outline typical procedures for formatting drawings Methods for implementing this outline are discussed below 0079 First the CAD drawing is input in function block 201 The user then decides what extraneous drawing objects to remove e g doors labels borders drawing scales stairs etc in function block 202 Remaining objects are formatted using drawing commands as described above in function block 203 Partition colors and descriptions are adjusted as desired in function block 204 After formatting all objects the drawing is verified in function block 206 0080 In the preferred embodiment verification is an automated sequential process that takes the user through a series of procedures as listed below to determine that all necessary data has been entered consistently In alternative embodiments the order of the procedures and functions of each procedure can be altered merged expanded modified or even omitted depending on the judgment of one skilled in Sep 23 2004 the art The verification process can also b
15. d allows the user to select points in the drawing One should note that when more than one check box option is selected the invention applies the selected snap modes to return a point closest to the center of the aperture box 0070 The Snap procedure is especially useful in drawing the floors of the environment when tracing raster images and drawing from scratch FIGS 7A through 7F illustrate the various snapping procedures which are used by AutoCAD and known to those skilled in the art For instance the Endpoint option snaps to the closest endpoint of an entity as shown in FIG 7A The Midpoint option snaps to the midpoint of an entity as shown in FIG 7B The Perpen dicular Node Nearest Intersection option snaps to a point perpendicular to an entity as shown in FIG 7C The node option snaps to a point object as shown in FIG 7D The Nearest option snaps to the nearest point on an entity The Intersection option snaps the intersection of two or more entities as shown in FIG 7E The Apparent Intersection option includes two separate snap modes Apparent Inter section and Extended Apparent Intersection The user can locate Intersection and Extended Intersection snap points while running Apparent Intersection object snap mode US 2004 0186847 A1 0071 Apparent Intersection snaps to the apparent inter section of two entities that do not intersect in 3D space but might appear to intersect onscreen Extended Apparent Intersection snaps
16. designation is carried out by assigning a particular numerical value to the field of each entity wherein the field is specified as part of the drawing database 0031 From the standpoint of radio wave propagation each obstruction partition in an environment i e each entity in the drawing or the equivalent thereof has several electromagnetic properties that directly affect it When a radio wave signal intersects a physical surface several things occur A certain percentage of the radio wave reflects off of the surface and continues along an altered trajectory A certain percentage of the radio wave penetrates through the surface and continues along its course A certain per centage of the radio wave is scattered once it strikes the surface The electromagnetic properties given to the obstruc tion partition categories when used in conjunction with known electromagnetic theory define this interaction within the environment Each category has parameters that include an attenuation factor surface roughness and reflectivity The attenuation factor determines the amount of power a radio signal loses when it penetrates through an entity of the given type The reflectivity determines the amount of the radio signal that is reflected from the entity as opposed to penetrating through it The surface roughness provides information used to determine how much of the radio signal is scattered upon striking an entity of the given type 0032 As
17. dict how much interference can be expected and where it will mani fest itself within the building or group of buildings Also providing a wireless system that minimizes equipment infra structure cost as well as installation cost is of significant economic importance As in building and microcell wireless systems proliferate these issues must be resolved quickly easily and inexpensively in a systematic and repeatable manner 0007 There are many computer aided design CAD products on the market that can be used to design the environment used in one s place of business or campus WiSE from Lucent Technology Inc SignalPro from EDX PLAnet by Mobile Systems International Inc and TEMS and TEMS Light from Ericsson are examples of wireless CAD products In practice however a pre existing building or campus is designed only on paper and a database of parameters defining the environment does not readily exist It has been difficult if not generally impossible to gather this disparate information and manipulate the data for the purposes of planning and implementation of indoor and outdoor RF wireless communication systems and each new environment requires tedious manual data formatting in order to run with computer generated wireless prediction models Recent research efforts by AT amp T Laboratories Brooklyn Polytechnic and Virginia Tech are described in papers and technical reports entitled Radio Propagation Measurements and P
18. dify an image with grip modes adjust an image for contrast clip the image with a rectangle or polygon or use an image as a cutting edge for a trim Examples of raster formats processed by the preferred embodiment of the present invention include but are not limited to Windows Bitmaps BMP Joint Photographic Experts Group format US 2004 0186847 A1 JPEG Graphical Interchange Format GIF Tagged Im age File Format TIFF Targa format TGA PICT and Postscript Raster drawings of any type may be converted into vector drawings or other vector data based represen tations The process involves using the imported raster drawing which is really just an image as a backdrop and then tracing over it with a mouse or other positioning device and adding new entities lines and polygons to generate a formatted database drawing 0037 Vector drawings are collections of individual lines and polygons Examples of vector formats include AutoCAD drawing files DWG Autodesk Drawing Exchange files DXF and Windows Metafiles WMF Because vector drawings already consist of lines and poly gons converting them into a format used by the present invention is straightforward In the preferred embodiment vector drawings are converted into BDM format drawings by simply loading them selecting lines and or polygons within the drawing and then assigning the selected entities to a given category 0038 When using pre existing data formats i
19. e fully automated without requiring user interaction The preferred embodi ment currently provides for the following steps 0081 Scale Drawing is used to scale a drawing to the proper size based on the known size of a par ticular object in the drawing 0082 Align Building Floors assists in aligning floors in a drawing after the different floors have been assembled in the drawing 0083 Ceiling Height allows the user to adjust the heights of ceilings in either meters or feet 0084 Set Partition Labels and Colors permits the user to set and modify the partition labels and the colors of the partitions The height may also be modified If the partitions already exist in a drawing the user can use this command to globally change the color of partitions or the partition s name 0085 Set Origin of Building Coordinate System allows the user to specify a reference point which to be stored in the drawing database This point is important for assembling drawings so that the point can automatically align the drawings 0086 Set Environmental Path Loss Parameters allows modification of partition labels path loss parameters and electrical characteristics such as attenuation parameters 0087 Create Boundary creates an invisible bound ary around a drawing to guide the predictive models so that the predictions calculations are reasonably bounded in the space within the database 0088 Create Legend allows the user to enter pe
20. ena or campus A common problem for wireless systems is inadequate coverage or a dead zone in a specific location such as a conference room It is now understood that an indoor wireless PBX private branch exchange system or wireless local area network WLAN can be rendered useless by interference from nearby similar systems The costs of in building and microcell devices which provide wireless coverage within a 2 kilometer radius are diminishing and the workload for RF engineers and technicians to install these on premises sys tems is increasing sharply Rapid engineering design and deployment methods for microcell and in building wireless systems are vital for cost efficient build out 0006 Analyzing radio signal coverage penetration and interference is of critical importance for a number of rea sons A design engineer must determine if an existing Sep 23 2004 outdoor large scale wireless system or macrocell will provide sufficient coverage throughout a building or group of buildings 1 9 a campus Alternatively wireless engi neers must determine whether local area coverage will be adequately supplemented by other existing macrocells or whether indoor wireless transceivers or picocells must be added The placement of these cells is critical from both a cost and performance standpoint If an indoor wireless system is being planned that interferes with signals from an outdoor macrocell the design engineer must pre
21. enerate definitions of the user s physical environment including buildings terrain and other site parameters com prising the steps of a creating and formatting a plurality of objects defining an environment of floors walls partitions buildings building complexes or compounds terrain foliage or other sites or obstructions b verifying the sufficiency of said plurality of objects to ensure a useful definition of said environment and notifying a user of results of said verification of suffi ciency and c generating a set of formatted data in a form transport able to and usable by an engineering planning model or other application 2 A method as recited in claim 1 said method further comprising at least one of the steps d inputting existing data vectors or drawing objects said existing data vectors or drawing objects either partially or fully describing said environment and e removing extraneous drawing objects to simplify said definition of said environment wherein steps d and e may be performed before or after step a if data exists that fully or partially defines said environment 3 A method as recited in claim 2 wherein said existing data is in the form of raster files or in the form of vector files wherein said raster files are selected from the group consisting of Windows Bitmaps BMP Joint Photographic Experts Group format JPEG Graphical Interchange For mat GIF Tagged Image File
22. ethod could be practiced with other products either now known or to be developed in the future SitePlanner is a trademark of Wireless Valley Com munications Inc 0023 Referring now to the drawings and more particu larly to FIG 1 there is shown a flow diagram for the method of the present invention In order to build a specially formatted database that contains data necessary and suffi cient for input into an engineering model a definition of the desired environment must first be built First existing data is entered into the system database in function block 101 This data may be in a variety of formats as described in detail later Because this existing data may be in a format which embodies unnecessary additional data legends map layers or text unneeded objects are removed from the database in function block 102 The existing objects are then formatted and embellished with additional information in function block 103 Objects may include simple lines representing walls or the sides of buildings or they may be polygons or polylines which represent trees foliage build ings or other obstructions An arbitrary number of objects may be drawn traced or moved using CAD commands which have a specific representation In the preferred embodiment each object or the group of objects saved in a file format known as DWG which is developed by AutoDesk Inc However it would be apparent to one skilled in the art how to practice
23. ing and geographic infor mation systems GIS The present invention determines the file format from the file contents not from the file extension Thus additional formats could be added easily by including their translation parameters in the method 0097 Often times only a scanned image of a floor plan is available as shown in FIG 2 A user can insert a raster or bitmapped black and white 8 bit gray 8 bit color or 24 bit color image file into the drawing Users can insert images in a variety of formats currently including BMP TIF RLE JPG GIF and TGA More than one image can be displayed in any viewport and the number and size of images is not limited Once the raster image is no longer needed the user can detach the image from the drawing 0098 There are two preferred ways that a scanned image can be formatted The first approach for formatting a raster image is shown in FIG 6A First the current floor is set in function block 401 In a new drawing this creates the necessary floor layers based upon the user s selection Therefore any newly drawn partitions will reside on the current floor as chosen by the user Then the image is imported in function block 402 and scaled in function block 403 Finally the drawing is verified in function block 404 Since this drawing originally did not contain any vector objects the drawing database consists only of an image of the given environment that has been scaled to the proper dime
24. ks do not demonstrate a systematic repeatable and fast meth odology for creating an environmental database nor do they report a method for visualizing and placing various envi ronmental objects that are required to model the propagation of RF signals in the deployment of a wireless system in that environment SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION 0008 Itis therefore an object of the invention to provide a method for manipulating drawings and electronic files to build databases for use in planning the positioning of components and for designing installing and optimizing a wireless communication system In the method raster scanned images of an environment may be entered or object files in various formats may be used as input to define an environment in which a wireless system is to be imple mented Detailed information about the location radio fre quency attenuation color and other physical information of an object such as intersections of the object with the ground floors ceilings and other objects in the environment is stored in a drawing database 0009 It is another object of the invention to provide a computerized drawing in a true three dimensional environ ment based on input data which is strictly two dimensional in nature The user sees the three dimensional drawing structure on a computer display by altering the views 0010 Itis another object of the invention to provide the resulting database of the inventive method in a for
25. loors These objects may US 2004 0186847 A1 be hidden at the user s discretion A user can display partition information by selecting objects in the drawing requesting partition information in the command menu A text window containing the returned information regarding the object s type location length and electrical attributes such as attenuation factor is displayed 0093 If more than one drawing is used to define the environment they must be assembled before final verifica tion An automated procedure combining several separate single floor drawings into one multi floored drawing may be executed 0094 Finally the drawing is verified in function block 206 as described above This verification will automatically make corrections to the legend that may have been corrupted after assembling several drawings into one file Methods for formatting a drawing from scratch are discussed below 0095 Referring now to FIG 6 a method is shown to format a raster image into a drawing that can be used for modeling Because computer monitors represent images by displaying them on a grid both vector and raster images are displayed on screen as small squares or dots known as pixels Raster images only consist of a rectangular grid of pixels 0096 The image file formats supported by the present invention include the most common formats used in major technical imaging application areas computer graphics document management and mapp
26. m easily used in a variety of modeling applications especially forms useful for engineering planning and management tools for wireless systems 0011 It is another object of the invention to support a universal method for creating and editing and transporting environmental databases for wireless communication sys tem design prediction measurement and optimization A systematic and automated method for producing a 3 D environmental database that is reproduceable and transport able between many different wireless system prediction Sep 23 2004 models measurement devices and optimization methods has value and is a marked improvement over present day systems 0012 According to the invention pre existing data for a desired environment may be scanned in traced or translated from another electronic format as a short cut to provide a partial definition for the environment The partial or empty environment is then refined using a specialized drawing program to enter entities and objects that fully define the environment in terms of floors partitions obstructions and other data required for engineering planning of a wireless communications network in the environment The input data are generally two dimensional 2D representations of the environment When ceiling height elevation above sea level or partition height data is entered the drawing may then automatically be viewed in three dimensions 3D This 3D representation enable
27. mentioned above the parameters given to each category fully define the entities contained within it Alter ing the parameters of a category directly affects all entities assigned to it This greatly simplifies the tedium of database creation for site specific modeling 0033 The method used to predict and optimize antenna positioning in a desired environment uses a number of models such as those described in the papers Interactive Coverage Region and System Design Simulation for Wire less Communication Systems in Multi floored Indoor Envi ronments SMT Plus IEEE ICUPC 96 Proceedings by R R Skidmore T S Rappaport and L Abbott Achievable Accuracy of Site Specific Path Loss Predictions in Residen tial Environments IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Tech nology VOL 48 No 3 May 1999 by L Piazzi and H L Bertoni hereinafter Achievable Accuracy Wireless Propagation in Buildings A Statistical Scattering Approach EEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology VOL 48 3 May 1999 by D Ullmo and H U Baranger Site Specific Propagation Prediction for Wire Sep 23 2004 less In Building Personal Communication System Design IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology VOL 43 No 4 November 1994 by S Y Seidel and T S Rappaport Antenna Effects on Indoor Obstructed Wireless Channels and a Deterministic Image Based Wide Band Propagation Model for In Building Personal Communication Sy
28. ns Inc SignalPro is a Trademark of EDX PLAnet is a trademark of Mobile Systems Interna tional 0028 Wireless prediction modeling software will typi cally utilize a site specific database format meaning that the database is specific to the area environment it represents This database can be thought of as being a collection of buildings and terrain properly scaled and positioned in three dimensional 3D space relative to one another In turn each building is a collection of the floors that it houses e g a nine story building has nine floors FIG 2 shows a typical building floor plan as it may be entered into the database Each floor is a collection of obstructions parti tions An obstruction partition is anything that impedes or otherwise affects the propagation of radio wave energy and thus must be considered when predicting the performance of a wireless communication system in the environment For example concrete walls brick walls sheetrock walls doors windows large filing cabinets and many others are all obstructions partitions At the same time a large crowd of people varying terrain or foliage could also be considered obstruction partitions 0029 The SitePlanner products specifically utilize a specially formatted vector database format meaning that it consists of lines and polygons rather than individual pixels as in a raster format The arrangement of lines and poly gons in the database corresponds to ob
29. nsions It does not contain information with regard to physical objects within the environment Depending on the application this may be sufficient for engineering use for instance when a wireless propagation prediction model only uses distance and does not rely on knowledge of the physical environment 0099 The second approach for formatting a raster image is shown in FIG 6B This method is similar to the method shown in FIG 6A with the addition of function block 405 Sep 23 2004 The scanned image is traced by the user to draw partitions and other obstructions prior to verification in function block 404 This method is similar to drawing a vector based drawing from scratch except that the scanned image pro vides a trace guide The end result is a drawing that can be used by all wireless system prediction models including those which rely on knowledge of the physical environment 0100 A distinct advantage of the present invention is that a true three dimensional environment is rendered from the drawings and stored in the database The ceiling heights or building heights that are specified are used to determine the vertical height of any partitions found on a given floor A height is defined for a category of partitions and this defines the object s height for each entity in that category This is done automatically during the formatting process Thus even though the formatting process was strictly two dimen sional in
30. of the method as shown in FIG 1 A wide variety of pre existing formats such as a paper map an electronic map a blueprint and existing CAD drawing a bitmap image or some other representation are used to obtain environmental information Most commonly this information is available in some form of electronic building blueprint or map information and in the case of buildings is often supplied one floor at a time That is a building blueprint usually involves a separate blueprint or other piece of information for each building floor Two possible formats for this information are raster and vector The present invention extracts environmental data from both formats One skilled in the art would see how both raster and vector data e g USGS raster terrain data with vector building overlays could be combined using the present invention 0035 Raster drawings or maps are collections of indi vidually colored points or pixels that when viewed as a whole form a picture representation of the environment FIG 3 shows a photograph of a house 10 made up of a series of colored pixels to represent the appearance of a house appearing here in black and white A raster image or map references the pixels in a specific grid rather than vectors Therefore raster images do not contain detailed information about objects 0036 The present invention allows raster images to be copied moved or clipped Using the present invention one can mo
31. ould then be saved again 0103 This formatted drawing can now be used in any number of applications Specifically it may be used in wireless communication system engineering planning and management tools for in building or microcell wireless system for instance as described in the concurrently filed and copending application Ser No entitled Method and System for Managing a Real Time Bill of Materials filed by T S Rappaport and R R Skidmore Docket 256016AA Ser No entitled Method and System for Automated Optimization of Antenna Positioning in 3 D filed by T S Rappaport and R R Skidmore Docket 256017AA and copending application Ser No 09 221 985 entitled System for Creating a Computer Model and Measurement Database of a Wireless Commu nication Network filed by T S Rappaport and R R Skidmore It may also be useful in any other number of applications that require a 3 D model of a building campus or urban environment 0104 While the invention has been described in terms of a single preferred embodiment those skilled in the art will US 2004 0186847 A1 recognize that the invention can be practiced with modifi cation within the spirit and scope of the appended claims Having thus described our invention what we claim as new and desire to secure by Letters Patent is as follows 1 A method for manipulating data from any environment in the world to construct a database that can be used to g
32. rediction Using Three dimensional Ray Tracing in Urban Environments at 908 MHZ and 1 9 GHz IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology VOL 48 No 3 May 1999 by S Kim B J Guarino Jr T M Willis II V Erceg S J Fortune R A Valenzuela L W Thomas J Ling and J D Moore hereinafter Radio Propagation Achievable Accuracy of Site Specific Path Loss Predic tions in Residential Environments EEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology VOL 48 No 3 May 1999 by L Piazzi and H L Bertoni Measurements and Models for Radio Path Loss and Penetration Loss In and Around Homes and Trees at 5 85 Ghz IEEE Transactions on Communi cations Vol 46 No 11 November 1998 by G Durgin T S Rappaport and H Xu Radio Propagation Prediction Techniques and Computer Aided Channel Modeling for Embedded Wireless Microsystems ARPA Annual Report MPRG Technical Report MPRG TR 94 12 July 1994 14 pp Virginia Tech Blacksburg by T S Rappaport M P Koushik J C Liberti C Pendyala and T P Subramanian Radio Propagation Prediction Techniques and Computer Aided Channel Modeling for Embedded Wireless Microsys tems MPRG Technical Report MPRG TR 95 08 July 1995 13 pp Virginia Tech Blacksburg by T S Rappaport M P Koushik C Carter and M Ahmed Use of Topo graphic Maps with Building Information to Determine Antenna Placements and GPS Satellite Coverage for Radio Detection amp
33. rently filed copending application Ser No Docket 256016AA and Ser No Docket 256017AA one preferably uses the present method for the preparation of building databases Depending on the chosen wireless system propagation or performance prediction model important information is needed such as physical distances partition locations floor locations and the num bers of floors and partitions Standard architectural draw ings like scanned images do not contain the necessary database information Therefore building a verified data base for use in the selected wireless system propagation or performance prediction model is essential to ensure the best results 0045 Computer Aided Design CAD programs create vector graphics made of lines and curves defined by math ematical objects called vectors Vectors describe graphics according to their geometric characteristics For example a wheel in a vector graphic is made up of a mathematical definition of a circle drawn with a certain radius thickness color and specific location A user can move resize or change the color of the wheel without losing the quality of the graphic 0046 The present invention utilizes the vector informa tion of imported maps drawings or electronic images and file formats as well as information input by users to build complex 3 D representations and vector based databases US 2004 0186847 A1 The preferred embodiment utilizes the drawing comm
34. rti nent information about a drawing and gives the user options to size the legend relative to the current window and options to add additional information to the legend such as a partition color legend a contour color legend and a measurement data color legend 0089 The Remove Purge Unnecessary Drawing Infor mation command must be selected manually to ensure appropriate purging of unused drawing objects 0090 Ifthe format definition of the database is modified it would be apparent to one skilled in the art how to change the method of verification to accommodate these modifica tions It would also be apparent to one skilled in the art how to modify and extend existing drawing or CAD packages to perform the method of the invention 0091 Referring to FIG 5 if the user starts from scratch and intends to implement a complete vector database for matting a drawing will consist only of drawing entities in function block 203 and assigning partition information to the drawing in function block 204 0092 In the preferred embodiment partitions are drawn and existing partitions can be modified Any entity or drawing object can be converted into a formatted partition on a particular floor The type of partition of a previously formatted entity can be modified The floor on which a particular formatted object resides can also be changed Objects will still remain visible in the drawing after con verting them to partitions on other f
35. s the design engineer to visually verify any parameters incorrectly entered The definition of the environment or drawings maps or other data are veri fied and the design engineer is automatically prompted to enter missing or inconsistent information Once the draw ing s have been verified the data defining the environment may be used by a variety of tools models wireless propa gation prediction methods measurement products or opti mization procedures that require information about an envi ronment s terrain levels physical make up and specific location of floors walls foliage or other obstruction and partition structures Anything that impedes or otherwise affects the propagation of radio wave energy must be con sidered when predicting the performance of a wireless communication system in the environment and the present methodology provides a simplified mechanism for collect ing and editing this information in a readily usable form The method for constructing and manipulating an indoor or outdoor environment is useful not only for wireless com munication designers but may also be useful for other applications as well BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS 0013 The foregoing and other objects aspects and advantages will be better understood from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the inven tion with reference to the drawings in which 0014 FIG 1 is a flow diagram of the general method of
36. stems International Journal of Wireless Information Networks Vol 1 No 1 1994 by C M P Ho T S Rappaport and M P Koushik and Interactive Computation of Coverage Regions for Wireless Communication in Multifloored Indoor Environments EEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication Vol 14 No 3 April 1996 by M A Panjwani A L Abbott and T S Rappaport Measurements and Models for Radio Path Loss and Penetration Loss In and Around Homes and Trees at 5 85 Ghz IEEE Transactions on Communications Vol 46 No 11 November 1998 by G Durgin T S Rappaport and H Xu and previously cited references all of which are hereby incorporated by refer ence Some simple models are also briefly described in SitePlanner 3 16 for Windows 95 98 NT User s Manual Wireless Valley Communications Inc 1999 hereby incor porated by reference It would be apparent to one skilled in the art how to apply other models to this method 0034 In order to build a database that can be used in site specific modeling as done for instance in SitePlanner or in equivalent programs now known or later developed or similarly in other applications one can either build each entity from scratch or start with a full or partial definition of the environment in some format The present invention offers many solutions to ease the incorporation of previously drawn or scanned images of building floor plans to accom plish step 101
37. structions partitions in the environment For example a line in the database could represent a wall a door or some other obstruction partition in the modeled environment 0030 Obstructions partitions are classified into catego ries The user may define different categories of obstruc tions partitions A category is defined by a textual descrip US 2004 0186847 A1 tion e g External Brick Walls a vertical height i e how tall is the wall a color to quickly distinguish it from entities belonging to other categories while viewing the drawing and electromagnetic properties discussed in fur ther detail later The category to which a given drawing entity where an entity is either a line or polygon has been assigned defines the type of obstruction partition it repre sents For example if a given line has been assigned to the user defined category of Sheetrock Walls then it shares the characteristics given by the user to all other entities within that category throughout the entire database drawing The process of either creating new entities or changing the category to which the entity belongs is a simple point and click process using a mouse or other positioning device by linking entities to a particular user defined category of partitions The preferred embodiment allows the physical electrical and aesthetic characteristics of entities of the same category to be individually or collectively edited Category
38. t is prob able that the map or drawing will contain information that is unneeded for the modeling and prediction steps Therefore one should remove unneeded objects from the drawing as shown in step 102 of FIG 1 0039 In addition to importing images and drawings a collection of commands that permit users to draw new floor plans to accomplish step 103 of the method is provided Multiple floor plans may be combined into three dimen sional multi floored drawing databases for use in the method also in step 103 0040 During the process of creating and formatting building databases one may view the current drawing in 3D as shown in step 105 of FIG 1 Each obstruction partition category has an associated height parameter that defines the vertical dimension of each entity in the given category By creating a new entity of a given category or converting an entity from or between categories the vertical dimension of the new entity is automatically adjusted to match that specified for the category Thus if the invention processes a 2D vector drawing 1 6 a drawing with individually select able lines and polygons selecting an entity and assigning it to a given category carries out the conversion between 2D and 3D automatically If the invention processes a raster drawing 1 a bitmap or similar format drawing that consists of individual colored pixels the drawing can be imported and traced over where with the creation of ea
39. then return to step 103 to enter additional necessary objects before running the verification procedure in function block 104 again This step provides automatic verification guid ance and prompts the user with feedback 0026 Once the drawing has been verified the data is stored in the database in function block 106 or can be exported for use in an application that does not read directly from the database This specially formatted data includes all information necessary to describe the building site or cam pus environment 0027 While the above description generally describes the method of the invention a more detailed description follows The current embodiment Building Database Manipulator BDM has been designed to operate integrally with the SitePlanner suite of products Therefore a detailed example of how each step is performed will use this embodi ment as a foundation for discussion However it should be understood that the BDM could be used with other wireless communications propagation models e g ray tracing mod els or statistical models other wireless prediction tools e g Lucent Technologies WiSE EDX SignalPro Eric sson TEMS MSI PLAnet or measurement tools now available e g a wireless LAIN transceiver a spectrum analyzer or any wireless measurement device such as a ZK Celltest 836 or a Berkeley Varitronics Champ receiver or developed in the future BDM is a trademark of Wireless Valley Communicatio
40. this invention with other applica tions and tools using other formats If additional objects are needed to describe the environment they are also added to the database here In the event that there is no pre existing data and the database must be built from scratch the process may begin at this point skipping steps 101 and 102 0024 Once the data has been entered the user may optionally display the 2D data as a 3D representation in function block 105 The 3D view can be displayed at any time after entering height data at the user s discretion 0025 Once the user has entered all of the data a verifi cation of the drawing may be performed in function block 104 At this point the process does a step by step analysis of the environment defined in the database to determine whether any data is missing The invention provides an interactive feedback to the engineer and prompts the user as to where scaling and alignment are required etc While the preferred embodiment is described in detail it should be evident to one skilled in the art that alternative methods such as totally automated verification may be possible Because any engineering planning tool requires a specific set of information to operate optimally and efficiently verification Sep 23 2004 is important The user is prompted to affirmatively declare that each piece of desired data has been entered and verified for proper format If there are missing data the user may
41. ting drawing is a true three dimen sional environment The user sees the three dimensional building structure by altering the views The resulting data base may be used in a variety of modeling applications but is especially useful for engineering planning and manage ment tools for in building or microcell wireless systems 10 Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 1 of 8 US 2004 0186847 INPUT EXISTING DATA REMOVE UNNEEDED OBJECTS 101 102 FORMAT EXISTING OBJECTS AND CREATE AND FORMAT NEW OBJECTS AS NEEDED OPTIONAL START 103 OPTIONAL VIEW 3D RENDERING OF ENVIRONMENT 104 VERIFY DRAWING AND UPDATE DB EXPORT DATA IN APPLICATION READABLE FORMAT 106 105 FIG 1 Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 2 of 8 US 2004 0186847 SECURE FIG 2 US 2004 0186847 0 Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 3 of 8 Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 4 of 8 US 2004 0186847 INPUT CAD DRAWING REMOVE EXTRANEOUS OBJECTS 201 FORMAT OBJECTS USING DRAWING FORMATTING COMMANDS 205 ADJUST PARTITION COLORS DESCRIPTIONS 204 VERIFY DRAWING 206 FIG 4 Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 5 of 8 US 2004 0186847 ASSIGN PARTITION INFO Patent Application Publication Sep 23 2004 Sheet 6 of 8 US 2004 0186847 SET CURRENT FLO
42. to the imaginary intersection of two objects that would appear to intersect if the objects were extended along their natural paths as shown in FIG 7F 0072 The Quick option snaps to the first snap point on the first object found Quick must be used in conjunction with other object snap modes 0073 Other useful commands are described below 0074 Show Distance Between Points command This command prompts the user to select two points in a drawing after which the distance the points are display 0075 Break Ungroup Entities command This command allows the user to ungroup and break apart objects 0076 Purge command In addition to the graphic objects used by the present method there are several types of non graphical objects that are stored in drawing files These objects have descriptive desig nations associated with them for example blocks layers groups and dimension styles In most cases the user names objects as they are created and they can later be renamed Names are stored in symbol tables When a named object is specified on the command line or selected from a dialog box the name and associated data of the object is referenced in the symbol table Unused unreferenced named objects can be purged from a drawing at any time during an editing session Purging reduces drawing size and therefore the memory requirements for working with the drawing Objects that are refer enced by other objects cannot be purge
Download Pdf Manuals
Related Search
Related Contents
3.3 Types d`objectifs et types de traitements USER GUIDE INTR ODUCTION GETTING STAR TED Digi Passport I-KVM User's Guide A9GT-50PRF Type Printer interface module User`s Manual Brodit ProClip 834830 画像センサカメラ 検査・計測の適切な画像がここまで簡単に TurnitinUK Moodle® Integration Instructor User Manual NeTYS PR 1000 Copyright © All rights reserved.
Failed to retrieve file