Enhancing GSM capacity in the indoor environment using the nanoBTS

The nanoBTS/spl trade/ from ip.access is a GSM/GPRS distributed base station system specifically designed as an inexpensive and flexible solution for coverage of the indoor environment. Thanks to its low power consumption and ease of installation, these GSM-over-IP modules can be used as in-fills to provide extra coverage and capacity or as a PBX replacement where mobile traffic and signalling are routed through the corporate intranet. However, in order to increase the system trunking efficiency, more efficient channel allocation schemes need to be employed; these may not be required for other type of picocell architectures such as distributed antennas systems. This paper explores such algorithms, which are being used within the wireless in-building solution offered by ip.access. Simulation results show that by employing a load based allocation algorithm, the call blocking probability is substantially reduced when compared with mobile driven cell selection schemes.