Narrowband fading analysis of indoor distributed antenna systems

The paper presents the effects of distributed antenna systems (DAS) on the Rice K factor by using practical measurements, in order to investigate the degree of possible fading degradation caused by the incoherent signal combination of the conventional DAS architecture. The measured distributions are compared with the theoretical Rice distribution and it is seen that there is no strong indication to consider any other distributions. It is found that the DAS system slightly decreases the K factor, but not sufficiently to have a detrimental effect on availability. Therefore, it is inferred that the dominant effect of DAS is to provide macro-diversity gain.