Vector Data

Different geographical features are expressed by different types of geometry:

Lines: One-dimensional lines or polylines are used for linear features such as rivers, roads, railroads, trails, and topographic lines.
Polygons: Two-dimensional polygons are used for geographical features that cover a particular area of the earth's surface. Such features may include lakes, park boundaries, buildings, city boundaries, or land uses. Polygons convey the most amount of information of the file types. Polygon features can measure perimeter and area.

Rural Topography, Clutter and Building Data

Rural vector databases allow the description of topography, land usage (clutter / morpho data) and building data based on 3D vector elements. Such databases are required for deterministic multi-path propagation models, such as the rural ray-tracing model, considering phenomena like multiple reflections and wave guiding effects in canyons. Rural vector databases offer the following features:

3D vector oriented database
Walls as planar objects with polygonal shape
Arbitrary location and orientation in space
Individual material properties

Urban Buildings

Urban vector databases contain a description of all buildings and vegetation areas in an urban environment. The buildings are described by polygonal cylinders, for example, buildings with arbitrary shapes can be used. Building databases offer the following features:

Each polygon can have an arbitrary number of corners.
Each polygon must have at least three corners to define a valid polygon (building).
Each building has a uniform height (polygonal cylinder). The height is either relative to the ground or absolute above sea level. Absolute height values require a topographical database additionally.
Each building has a single set of material properties which are used for the entire building.
Flat rooftops are used (horizontal planes).
Only vertical walls (parallel to the z-axis) are allowed.
The polygon of a building must not intersect itself.
The polygon of a building might intersect other polygons (buildings).

Indoor 3D Objects

Indoor vector databases allow the description of each arbitrary object. To limit the complexity of the file and data format, WinProp supports only planar objects. In the indoor database, they are called walls – but such planar elements are not limited to walls. Also, tables, cupboards and all further indoor objects can be modeled with these planar elements. The elements can have an arbitrary number of corners. Round objects must be approximated with planar objects. The more planar objects, the better the approximation – but also the longer the computation times during the propagation analysis. Indoor databases offer the following features:

3D vector oriented database
Walls as planar objects with polygonal shape
Arbitrary location and orientation in space
Individual material properties
Subdivisions with different material properties to model doors and windows

Time-Variant

Time variance does influence the wave propagation significantly. Because of that WinProp offers a module to consider time-variant effects in the wave propagation computation. The time-variant vector databases are based on indoor vector databases, but extend these files with time-variant properties. Each ordinary indoor database can be transformed into a time-variant database. In addition to indoor databases time-variant databases offer the following features:

Motion can be assigned to all objects.
Translation and rotation are possible.

Tunnels

Tunnel databases have a special layout and can also be used in ProMan. These databases are generated with the TuMan component.