Measurements of PCS microwave propagation in buildings

The authors describe measurements of PCS (personal communication services) propagation in different indoor environments and the application of a novel indoor loss-distance model. The dynamic effects of indoor activities by people are also examined. It is noted that people in indoor propagation environments can cause a substantial amount of fading of the received signal. Fades with more than 10-dB magnitude were observed in the measurements reported. The standard deviation of the fading signal correlates with the amount of human activity in the region of propagation. The distribution of the fading signal can be modeled with the log-normal distribution. As a consequence, deeper fades are more likely to be observed when there is more human activity, which is exactly what has been observed. The instantaneous fading rate, an important temporal parameter for radio design, was found to be a Laplacian random process with a standard deviation on the order of 1 dB/s.<>