Indoor Model Calibration and Verification

The need for reliable communication inside commercial venues, offices and residential buildings is always increasing for business and personal demands. Distributed Antenna System (DAS) has become as vital to a building as water or electricity. Also, 5G, IOT, and public safety will require high-performance and reliable in-building connection.

Since no two DAS installations are the same, radio propagation in indoor environment differs greatly from the outdoor one, not just because of wall losses but also due to the close proximity of reflecting structures (walls, floors …etc.) which introduce a different fading profile; all are resulting in a totally different RF behavior that varies greatly even from one place to another within the same building (if not within the same room). Indoor model calibration is a key part of the site survey during the design phase to show the effect of construction materials and reveal complex propagation mechanisms. In many cases, indoor model calibration is the preferable method to overcome uncertainties of prediction/planning tool. Indoor model calibration with CW test will result in a good selected and constructed network infrastructure and eliminates hand over failures, lost capacity, network rip, and network replacement.

Waveform propagation will vary between different bands in the same antenna location; hence, CW test results should be recorded on each technology band in a separate report, doing multiple CW tests for each antenna location will be costly and time wasting and site access limitations may add time limitation for site survey team as well.