Design template and measurements for antenna planning in an indoor radio environment at 1800 MHz

Recently, the demand for an accurate design on the distribution of the antennas in shopping malls is growing rapidly. To provide a guaranteed coverage inside the shopping malls, mobile operators may have installed a lot more antennas than that is really needed. This over-engineering design has increased the installation and operation cost. Therefore, the need to have a relatively more accurate indoor design is the most requesting goal in the telecommunication industry. The purpose of this paper is to derive an indoor design template, which can facilitate mobile operators to evaluate efficiently the optimized number of antennas and their locations within a premises. A tunnel propagation model is used to represent the propagation loss in an indoor environment. Measurements are also taken to derive the losses of various media. Field tests are finally performed to verify the accuracy of the distribution of RF signal strength predicted by the design template.