Influence of people shadowing on bit error rate of IEEE802.11 2.4 GHz channel

Installations of IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs) have been growing exponentially over the past two years due to their low cost and high-speed data rate capabilities. Although many organizations have started using WLANs, there are still few tools available that assist in the design of WLAN networks. As a result, the current deployment of WLAN networks remains ad-hoc in nature. The objective of the research reported here is to develop modeling tools for performance optimization of WLAN networks. In particular, we attempt to develop propagation models that can predict the signal strength and interference in a WLAN system by taking environment specific parameters into account such as the structure of the building, presence or absence of stationary obstacles, etc (COST231 Final Report, 1998). This paper investigates the influence of moving obstacles, such as people, on radio wave propagation inside a building and the effect on received signal quality, in particular the bit error rate in an IEEE802.11 2.4 GHz channel. Our findings suggest that the presence of moving obstacles, such as people, causes strong variations in the received signal, which seriously affects the quality of the received signal.