TABLE OF CONTENTS In mobile communications, namely within COST 273, the term scenario is applied to many levels, objectives, and fields. Frequently, it concerns a set of parameters adopted within a group of inter-working parties, following the needs and forecast of envisaged situations. Scenarios are often used as foresight exercises, seeking major trends in the overall mobile communications panorama, e.g. [GGFC04], [Poll02]. Several projects in the field define and use scenarios in that sense. Some directly involve propagation issues, while others do not. In another way, scenarios are also used in testing the performance of a system or technology, with near-future objectives within a specific project or group. It is in these cases that scenarios are defined to aid in the study, understanding and measuring of the properties of the propagation channel (several of these are described in Sections 4.4 and 6.6).
Independently of the perspectives, a propagation scenario shall be part of an integrated set that determines propagation, interference, correlation and spatial richness. Traffic, services provision, social distributions and physical settings all have an impact on those overall channel conditions. All system layers interrelate, being of the utmost importance to define reference scenarios such as in Section 8.2, Mobile Radio Access Network Reference Scenarios (MORANS). For Section 8.2 this propagation scenario should indirectly reflect some characteristics of such upper layers.
In practical terms, within COST 273, a propagation scenario is defined following two perspectives: considering the location of MTs, subject to certain path-loss conditions, to define...
