Handover performance of HVAC duct based indoor wireless networks

In this paper, we present a performance analysis for different implementations of handover in indoor wireless networks (IWN) that use heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) ducts as communication channels. If FDMA/TDMA technology is used, our results show that the handover performance, i.e., new call blocking and handover dropping probabilities, of an IWN that uses HVAC ducts are up to 6.6 times better for practical scenarios compared to those of traditional IWN (i.e., IWN that do not use HVAC ducts). Our results also indicate that for scenarios under investigation, using a single access point to serve one floor and its staircase region achieves the best handover performance for IWN that use HVAC ducts. The solution to the handover problem in HVAC-IWN is tightly coupled with the coverage, capacity, and load balancing issues in indoor wireless networks. We show, for the first time, that the proposed solution to the handover problem in HVAC-IWN results in an increase in capacity per coverage area, an increase in the radius of coverage for an access point, and can be used to achieve load balancing in WLAN that use IEEE 802.11 technology.