Analysis of Outdoor-to-Indoor Propagation at 169 MHz for Smart Metering Applications

An experimental work aimed at assessing the outdoor-to-indoor propagation losses at 169 MHz is described in this paper. The building penetration loss, often considered as an additional constant value to be added to propagation losses in previous studies, is here on the contrary regarded as a random variable; its cumulative distribution is extracted from the measured data and is found to be approximately Gaussian. Moreover, in order to account for the critical installation conditions which may be experienced by indoor wireless devices in particular applications (e.g., wireless smart metering), an additional loss term, here indicated as installation loss, is introduced and its value is investigated in some reference cases. The achieved results are also embedded into a statistical procedure similar to those commonly adopted for wireless cellular networks planning.