Characterization of time-varying cellular signals in buildings: Application to packet retry schemes

In this paper, a characterization of the temporal variation of cellular signals at fixed locations inside urban buildings is presented through measurements and analysis. The signals fluctuate on several time scales due to the varying presence and number of scatterers in the environment. The measurement data are used to examine the viability of network performance enhancement techniques e.g., packet retry, and the improvement from such techniques is examined as a function of the various packet and network parameters which can be varied, including packet length and number of retries