Wideband wireless indoor communications

As more high data rate wireless indoor networks are being implemented there is an increasing need to fully characterise the indoor channel. This paper presents the results of an extensive study into radiowave propagation within buildings; investigating 3 different corridors and 8 separate rooms. Different measurement scenarios have been investigated using a wideband channel sounder with the transmitter and receiver located in different positions in each room and corridor, using both directional and omnidirectional antennas. The measured transfer functions and estimated impulse responses have been used to generate statistics (delay spread and coherence bandwidth) to describe the channel. The analysis on the measurements found there was little correlation between different measurement positions indicating that it would be possible to implement systems using diversity gain. Impulse responses in smaller and larger rooms are similar apart from the fact that larger rooms receive components of larger delay times than smaller rooms. The variation of channel characteristics are similar for L-band and X-band for the line of sight condition but for non line of sight the variation of X-band is much greater than that of L-band.