Study of Indoor Propagation Models in an Emulated LTE Network

The growth in mobile network data traffic is even more noticeable in networks compatible with the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard. As such, both academia and industry seek mechanisms aimed at improving new communications systems, therefore, new test benches are required. The emulators are candidates to validate the proposals without affecting the real central systems. However, many papers that seek to address LTE emulation ignore the not-so-insignificant effect of wireless media propagation features. In this work, a characterization of the main propagation models used by typical emulation systems has been carried out. The network simulator three tool using indoor propagation models, has compared the outcomes achieved compared with the results obtained in a real test bench. Since most mobile data in the coming years is forecast to be mobile video traffic, this study focuses on a live video streaming service, considering both real-time message protocol and real-time streaming protocol transmission protocols. From the results, we demonstrate that only one of the propagation models under study is able to equate with a real LTE system performance. Thereby, the emulation system under this specific setup is well suited to conducting performance tests of LTE networks supporting video streaming services in indoor scenarios.