**4. LoRaWAN Planning Simulator Setup**

### *4.1. Planning Simulator*

The in-house developed 3D Ray-Launching (3D-RL) technique is based on GO and the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD). The first step of such a technique is the creation of the scenario under analysis, which should consider all the obstacles within it, such as buildings, vehicles, vegetation, or people. This design phase is essential for obtaining accurate results for the real environment. Once the scenario is properly created, the frequency of operation, number of reflections, radiation pattern of the transceivers and angular and spatial resolution can be fixed as input parameters in the algorithm for simulation. Then, the whole scenario is divided into a 3D mesh of cuboids, in which all the electromagnetic phenomena are saved during simulation, emulating the electromagnetic propagation of the real waves. A detailed description of the inner-workings of the 3D-RL tool is out of the scope of this article, but the interested reader can find further information in [110].

It is worth pointing out that smart campus ecosystems are challenging environments in terms of radio propagation analysis due to their large dimensions as well as for the multipath propagation, which is caused by the multiple obstacles within them. Hence, to achieve a good trade-off between simulation computational cost and result accuracy, it is important to determine the optimal parameters for the number of reflections and the angular and spatial resolution of the RL algorithm. For such a purpose, an analysis of the optimal input parameters for the RL tool applied in large complex environments is presented in [111]. Such previous results have been considered to obtain the simulation parameters for the proposed smart campus scenario and the final values are summarized in Table 3.

**Table 3.** 3D Ray-Launching parameters.

