An experimental TDMA indoor radio communications system using slow frequency hopping and coding

The general principles, implementation, and performance of a 1-Mb/s time-division-multiple-access (TDMA), slow frequency hopping and coding, 1.5-GHz radio communications system for a medium-sized office building are discussed. TDMA is provided for service flexibility and slow frequency hopping and coding for immunity against multipath fading and interference. Measurements show that, with a hallway-mounted distributed antenna system installed on one floor of the building and with the mobile unit transmitting only 1 mW of peak RF power from anywhere on that floor, only a single 384-b frame out of a total of 200000 transmitted frames suffered an unrecoverable error. This kind of performance is comparable to that of wired data modems. Similar performance was obtained from a central antenna covering the same floor. However, the required transmitted power in this case was 100 mW. Implementation issues, such as spectrum allocation, cellular subdivisions, and spectrum efficiency, are also discussed.<
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