3D Indoor Radio Coverage for 5G Planning: a Framework of Combining BIM with Ray-tracing

This paper presents a framework to predict indoor radio wave coverage in buildings. Such method includes the capability to import BIM (Building Information Modelling) files that contain structured physical geometry and dimension data, including the material types that are of uttermost importance in evaluating their dielectric properties. Appropriated extraction of physical and dielectric attributes of the building elements was used as input to a 3D radio wave propagation ray-tracing developed in MatLab that allows the prediction of the received radio signal level at any location within the computational volume. Results are presented for line-of-sight contributions and first and second order reflections. Despite the generic nature of the proposed framework, prediction results are presented at 3.6 GHz, envisaging emerging 5G indoor radio coverage.