How To Setup Multipoint Studies For Faster Run Times

Given a large enough number of CPEs or very high-resolution geodata you may need to adjust some settings to improve performance. The most important setting can be found in the Multipoint study details (Studies>Multipoint Studies>Modify Study.) Make sure that you have selected one of the options to limit the calculation distance from the sectors.

You can select to limit based either on the ‘Approximate Sector Range’ or on the ‘Sector Study Radius’ value. Both of these parameters can be found in the sector properties. Two distance options are available here because in many cases it can be desirable to use different distance limits for your area studies and multipoint studies.

The study point spacing on path value found in the sector properties (Right click on site>site properties>study sector/sector range) has a dramatic impact on how long it takes to run a path for a single CPE.

Increasing this value will make the study run faster, but will reduce the underlying granularity of the calculation. Notice that you can set both the study radius and the approximate sector range within the sector properties as well.

Some projects may have an extremely large list of subscriber locations and need a faster way to find signal level and performance predictions to each subscriber. IoT and Smart Cities projects in particular may include hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscriber device locations in the network. Modeling each of these subscribers as a discrete CPE would be inefficient, especially on a typical desktop PC. To solve this problem the latest version of SignalPro includes a query feature that allows you to leverage much faster area study results and report the study results for each subscriber location.

If you have a very large number of CPEs, into the tens of thousands for example, then area studies might run more quickly than multipoint studies. In these cases you might consider running area studies and then using the ‘Query -> Area Study Queries by Point’ function.

This allows you to import a large list of points from a CSV, tower/pole database, or your CPE list and run a query to look up the area study grid value at each subscriber location and export the result. Bear in mind that the area study will use the mobile/remote height for every result, so variations in CPE height will not be taken into account using this method.