Simulating coverage and capacity in the indoor environment when using the nanoBTS

In-building, wireless voice-communication services are being driven by businesses looking for ways to become more productive through convenient and cost-effective "intra-office" communication. In such environments, distributed antennas systems (DAS) are commonly used; however, DAS use expensive co-axial cables or optic fibers. The nanoBTS, from ip.access, is a GSM distributed base station (DBS) system specifically designed to be a flexible and inexpensive solution for coverage of the indoor environment. Occupying a small footprint, no larger than that of a PC notebook, each BTS can be mounted unobtrusively on a wall or ceiling, taking its power and traffic from a single 10/100 switched Ethernet connection. Multiple BTS\´s can be distributed within buildings for providing coverage over wide areas; however, in order to increase the system trunking efficiency, effective channel allocation algorithms need to be used at the BSC; which make use of the overlaps of coverage for distributing the load between different cells. This paper examines the propagation effects which need to be considered when implementing the simulator, which has been designed to evaluate the capacity gains of these channel allocation algorithms within the indoor environment.