Partition-Based Analytic Evaluation of Building Wireless Performance

Abstract

Complex building structures constrain indoor wireless communications. The significant dependence between the indoor wireless network performance and the building structures can be considered as an intrinsic property of a building, which means that the building has to be designed to achieve desirable indoor wireless network performance. The power gain (PG) and the interference gain (IG) have been defined as the figures of merit (FoMs) to evaluate the wireless performance of a building. Employing open space as the benchmark, the PG and the IG respectively quantify the effective change of the intended signal power and the undesired power, i.e., the interference and thermal noise power, received in a targeted user equipment (UE) location due to the presence of the building. In this paper, a tractable approach is proposed to obtain the PG and the IG with a partition-based path gain model. It enables the PG and the IG to capture the impact of both building materials and the building layout on indoor wireless network performance. Numerical results show that the analytical models in closed-form expressions facilitate the wireless performance assessment to a given building computational-efficiently. This work is a critical complement to the initial framework of the building wireless performance (BWP) evaluation. The proposed method can be employed in future wireless-friendly building design.