Measurement and comparison of wi-fi and super wi-fi indoor propagation characteristics in a multi-floored building

Super Wi-Fi is a Wi-Fi-like service exploiting TV white space (WS) which is expected to achieve larger coverage than today's Wi-Fi thanks to its superior propagation characteristics. Super Wi-Fi has been materialized as an international standard, IEEE 802.11af, targeting indoor and outdoor applications, and is undergoing worldwide field tests. This paper demonstrates the true potential of indoor Super Wi-Fi, by experimentally comparing the signal propagation characteristics of SuperWi-Fi andWi-Fi in the same indoor environment. Specifically, we measured the wall and floor attenuation factors and the path-loss distribution at 770MHz, 2.401 GHz, and 5.540 GHz, and predicted the downlink capacity of Wi-Fi and Super Wi-Fi. The experimental results have revealed that TVWS signals can penetrate up to two floors above and below, whereas Wi-Fi signals experience significant path loss even through a single floor. It has been also shown that Super Wi-Fi mitigates shaded regions of Wi-Fi by providing almost-homogeneous data rates within its coverage, performs comparable to Wi-Fi utilizing less bandwidth, and always achieves better spectral efficiency than Wi-Fi. The observed phenomena imply that SuperWi-Fi is suitable for indoor applications and has the potential of extending horizontal and vertical coverage of today's Wi-Fi.