A Combined Technical and Economic Comparison of Indoor and Outdoor 4G OFDMA Infrastructure

This paper presents a technique for using propagation measurements to perform a site-specific technical and economic comparison of indoor and outdoor orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) infrastructure. This work is motivated by the fact that fourth generation (4G) network operators have a choice when provisioning a network to serve indoor users. An operator can choose to retrofit existing outdoor cellular macro-cell base station sites with 4G equipment or to deploy new compact indoor pico-cell base stations. This paper will illustrate how multi-antenna propagation measurements can be collected and used to estimate the throughput of an indoor or outdoor base station. This information will then be incorporated into an economic analysis that determine what sort of network will have the lowest operating and capital costs while still meeting user requirements. This approach is illustrated using a university campus case study.