Characterization of indoor propagation for three dimensional femtocell environment

Femtocell gains the interest of more than 160 mobile operators around the world. For the reason that femtocell improve the signal power inside the building and reduce the main network traffic and thus increase the capacity. However, deployment the femtocell may cause interference to the existing network. Therefore, understanding the behavior of indoor signal propagation is essential to minimize the interference and get the total benefit of femtocell deployment. In this paper, measurements of the signal strength at 2.6 GHz were carried out for three dimensional scenario using Omni-directional antenna. The line of sight and none of sight cases were considered in the proposed scenario. These measurements are important in order to propose an empirical model for indoor propagation that may be used in system level simulators. In addition, a comparison with available models for indoor propagation was conducted. It was found that the available models in the literature are underestimated the measured data.