On predicting in-building WiFi coverage with a fast discrete approach

A new approach for predicting coverage of wireless LAN at 2.4 GHz is presented. Coverage prediction is one of the core parts of indoor wireless LAN planning tools. The main concern it has to deal with is providing a good trade-off between prediction accuracy and computational load. Usual approaches belong to either empirical or deterministic methods. A new perspective has recently been offered that exploits a discrete formalism based on the TLM formulation. It is referred to as Multi-Resolution Frequency Domain ParFlow (MR-FDPF). While ray-tracing handles computational load by restricting the number of considered paths, the proposed approach acts by adapting the spatial resolution. This paper presents the straight lines of MR-FDPF and details the conditions for efficient in-building coverage prediction at 2.4 GHz. In a second part this paper tackles the calibration problem and claims for an automatic calibration process to improve the fit between predictions and measurements. A couple of experiments are presented.

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