Radio Propagation and Adaptive Antennas for Wireless Communication Networks, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER SIXIndoor Radio Propagation

Indoor use of wireless systems poses one of the biggest design challenges, as indoor radio propagation is essentially a Black Art. Personal communications systems (PCS), wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless private branch exchanges (WPBXs), and Home Phoneline Network Alliance (HomePNA, IEEE 802.11x, etc.) are the services that are being deployed in indoor areas on an increasing scale. The latter application of indoor wireless networks is proving to have a large market as it will be integrated to the emerging Digital Subscriber WLAN technologies. The present deployment of WLAN services is reaching out to offices, schools, hospitals, and factories. The increasing demand for indoor radio applications, such as wireless LAN, “Smart house,” and so on, develops a need to design and analyze those systems wisely and efficiently. An important consideration in successful implementation of the PCS is indoor radio communication. In the design process of those systems, the designer is required to place the picocell antennas (at ranges not more than 100 m) in a way that will provide an optimal coverage of the building area [1–4]. Recent standardization of femto and pico base stations (BS), also called the femto access points (FAPs) and pico access points (PAPs), deployed in indoor environments, availability of the 4-G mobile broadband technologies for indoor environments, incorporation of the self-organized networks (SONs) algorithms into the optimization ...