Experimental estimation of the large-scale fading in an indoor environment and its impact on the planning of wireless networks

Currently many mobile network operators estimate the local mean power without a standard, well-established procedure in indoor environments; this can generate an over dimensioning of the wireless network. In this paper, the experimental local mean power is estimated in an indoor environment and at the same time it shows the impact of the local mean power variations in the planning of a wireless network. The local mean is obtained by dividing the area in a grid, then the receive power samples, which are within each square of the grid, are averaged. The square size is modified to find the experimental large scale fading that meets certain conditions. A comparison of the large scale fading obtained with two techniques was developed by calculating the total quadratic error. Finally the influence of the local mean variations in the initial dimensioning of a wireless network is shown. The experiment was carried out inside a building at 900 and 1900 MHz.