Antenna Configuration in WCDMA Indoor Network

The target of the paper is to provide guidelines for indoor antenna selection for distributed antenna system or radiating cable implementation. Distributed antenna system is a commonly used antenna system for indoor installations, and radiating cables are often used in tunnels, airplanes, or similar constricted areas. However, guidelines for optimizing WCDMA indoor network antenna configuration are lacking in the literature. Distributed antenna system with variable amount of antennas is compared to radiating cable, and the behavior of the system is analyzed by a number of indicators. The results show that distributed antenna system is a favorable solution compared to radiating cables. In addition, it can be concluded that the capacity of the network is not highly proportional to the number of antennas in distributed antenna system, but they affect more the coverage of the network. Keywords–DAS, field measurements, indoor, radiating cable, WCDMA