A Site-Specific Study of In-Building Wireless Solutions

This paper studies the different ways of extending wireless coverage for high data rates and improving the data capacity in a building. The solutions considered include deployments of single or multiple small base stations, i.e. Picocell or Femtocell, and distributed antenna system, operated on the same frequency as the macro cellular network. We look at the radio performance of each solution in a LTE downlink context with in-building path loss values retrieved from real-life measurements. The performance is compared by means of maximum supportable user numbers and average system throughput. Potential gains by hard frequency reuse in the building and QoS based packet scheduling are examined. Simulation results show the robustness of the proposed distributed antenna system and the conditions for multi-Femtocell deployment.