A Coverage Prediction Technique for Indoor Wireless Campus Network

The placement of an Access Point (AP) is an important key to determine the spread of the signal. To get the optimal spread of signals, a network designer is required to understand how much coverage an AP can generate. A prediction is given to describe the coverage area produced based on AP placement for the wireless campus network, using a coordinate map modeling based on the real size for the indoor environment. The theoretical approach is used to determine the coverage area of an AP device by testing the function of the distance between the AP and the user. The results show that the signal generated by an AP will cover the entire area that is still on the LOS propagation path. The coverage area generated through AP placement in this case study reached 77.5%. The maximum distance between the AP and the user so that it is within the coverage area is 13.851m. There are still areas that are not covered by the AP, especially for the NLOS propagation path because of the obstruction around the AP.The placement of an Access Point (AP) is an important key to determine the spread of the signal. To get the optimal spread of signals, a network designer is required to understand how much coverage an AP can generate. A prediction is given to describe the coverage area produced based on AP placement for the wireless campus network, using a coordinate map modeling based on the real size for the indoor environment. The theoretical approach is used to determine the coverage area of an AP device by testing the function of the distance between the AP and the user. The results show that the signal generated by an AP will cover the entire area that is still on the LOS propagation path. The coverage area generated through AP placement in this case study reached 77.5%. The maximum distance between the AP and the user so that it is within the coverage area is 13.851m. There are still areas that are not covered by the AP, especially for the NLOS propagation path because of the obstruction around the AP

Wireless coverage prediction via parametric shortest paths

When deciding where to place access points in a wireless network, it is useful to model the signal propagation loss between a proposed antenna location and the areas it may cover. The indoor dominant path (IDP) model, introduced by W\"{o}lfle et al., is shown in the literature to have good validation and generalization error, is faster to compute than competing methods, and is used in commercial software such as WinProp, iBwave Design, and CellTrace. Previously, the algorithms known for computing it involved a worst-case exponential-time tree search, with pruning heuristics to speed it up. We prove that the IDP model can be reduced to a parametric shortest path computation on a graph derived from the walls in the floorplan. It therefore admits a quasipolynomial-time (i.e., $n^{O(\log n)}$) algorithm. We also give a practical approximation algorithm based on running a small constant number of shortest path computations. Its provable worst-case additive error (in dB) can be made arbitrarily small via appropriate choices of parameters, and is well below 1dB for reasonable choices. We evaluate our approximation algorithm empirically against the exact IDP model, and show that it consistently beats its theoretical worst-case bounds, solving the model exactly (i.e., no error) in the vast majority of cases.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, accepted to MobiHoc 201