Measuring structure penetration loss and indoor propagation at 700 MHz: Spatio-temporal data acquisition system to perform a Wireless Channel Reconstruction Based on Perimeter Channel Measurements

Overview of Proposed Work Guaranteeing reliable and ubiquitous signal reception is one of the current challenges faced by wireless communications systems. Ideally, wireless transmissions suffer only from propagation losses. In reality, the landscape through which wireless information travels often contains structures that contribute to significant losses in signal reception. This is largely a result of reflections and refractions that contribute to excess transmission losses. While increasing broadcast power will help signal integrity at the receiving end, it will invariably contribute to higher co-channel interference [1]. The high demand for ubiquitous signal reception, coupled with the aforementioned challenges, have motivated research in the development of propagation prediction models [1-6]. These prediction models are usually developed and tested through channel sounding methods. Channel sounding is a technique used for learning the characteristics and behavior of the radio channel, for building a more accurate model of the wireless channel, and for improving testing algorithms for wireless systems [11]. A wireless channel usually has multiple propagation paths; as a result, a wireless channel may become frequency dependent, time dependent, or position dependent. Frequency and time dependency are usually used to study a wireless channel. Current efforts to understand electromagnetic propagation in the radio spectrum have relied predominantly on two types of modeling: stochastic and deterministic. Rigorous channel measurements are essential in developing and evaluating these models. However, current techniques used in field measurements are often complicated by the need to measure antenna positioning. Some solutions include setting up a grid, as illustrated in Figure 1, or using track measurements. These strategies tend to be impractical and inefficient because they are time consuming and require much more equipment to be carried to the field.