Hybrid Model for Indoor-to-Outdoor Femtocell Radio Coverage Prediction

In this paper, a hybrid model to compute the indoor-to-outdoor path-loss for femtocells is proposed. In this approach, indoor propagation is computed with the FDTD (Finite-Difference Time-Domain) model, thus providing high accuracy inside the building where the femtocell is deployed. On the other hand, outdoor propagation is computed with an empirical approach. Performance of the model is evaluated with on-site radio measurements, and it is shown that the proposed approach reaches a reasonable compromise: it overcomes the low prediction accuracy of using only an empirical model, while reducing the computational load of using FDTD for the whole scenario.