A tool for coexistence planning in complex radio communication environments

Interference in the vicinity of a receiving radio system can cause serious degradation of the radio communication performance. This may even result in disruptions and lost calls. Existing analysis tools to analyze interference problems in advance are often specialized at certain radio technologies or so complicated that they can only be used by experienced specialists. To foresee and prevent such communication problems, a scenario based research tool for electromagnetic interference analysis has been developed. The tool is named GENESIS and can be used by larger user groups that are not experienced specialists. The tool can identify, by use of smart color-mapping, the regions where the risk for communication problems may arise, and the dominant interference sources can be identified. Moreover, the influence from different radio parameters, such as carrier frequency choice, out-of band emissions or frequency hopping band, can be analyzed and visualized. Hence, the effect of different EMC design strategies can be evaluated in the tool. In this paper, we specifically show how different requirements on out-of-band emissions can be analyzed for co-located frequency hopping systems and how the interference impact can be presented and visualized in several ways as a lower communication quality or reduced communication range.