Indoor propagation prediction and measurements within multistory building for wireless LAN applications

In recent years, the possibility of using radio for data and voice communications inside the buildings has become an attractive proposition. A prerequisite to the design of indoor radio communication systems is knowledge of indoor propagation characteristics. These characteristics can be used to determine the optimum location of the base station antenna for a desired coverage within a building. Propagation prediction within buildings is made difficult by the occurrence of various propagation phenomena which depend on specific building structures. In this project the investigation for WLAN system is done for three different buildings inside University of Technology Malaysia. The Site Ware Technology's site specific propagation prediction tool is a three-dimensional (3-D) ray tracing code employing modified shoot and bounce ray(SBR) method know as the Vertical Plane Launch (VPL) will be used to predict indoor propagation effects with different building structures to show the prediction of the path loss and the time delay spread for WLAN system inside these buildings, also a comparison between the real time measurements using AirMagnet software and the prediction using VPL software has been done for verification and the AutoCAD tool with the help of Ms Excel, was used to measure all the building's dimensions for highly accurate building database. The results from both prediction and measurement are in form of numbers, so Matlab has been used to present these outputs in 2D display. Finally, based on the evaluation results, we provide a set of recommendations that might help to improve this work and fulfill the indoor user requirements

Antenna design using left-handed materials

Smart antenna technologies are emerging as an innovative way to meet the growing demand for more powerful, cost-effective and highly efficient wireless communication systems. In this project, from broad category of smart antenna techniques, the switch beam digital-beamforming technique in the downlink is deployed to improve the fidelity and performance of WiMax application. In this regards, the designed system forms and steer the beam according to the user location which is known to the system. In addition, the system performs sidelobe cancellation base on the chebyshev algorithm to optimize the antenna radiation pattern. The design and implementation steps are as follow: the system is firstly modeled by MATLAB software. After modeling, the algorithm is implemented in DSP by using C and Code Composer Studio. After DSP hardware implementation, the signal management is performed in DSP before transmission to the FPGA board. This management is necessary, in order to make processed signal in DSP suitable for channel separation process in FPGA. FPGA is deployed to split the data stream into sixteen channels corresponding to number of antenna elements. Next, the FPGA and DSP are integrated together to form the baseband switch beam smart antenna system. After integration process, the hardware is tested; the results prove that the system functions properly as we expected from simulation model. In this project, lastly, the initial design of IF, RF-front-end and their necessary circuits are also portrayed to be used in the next smart antenna research project