Global optimization of indoor radio coverage

The new focus of wireless communication is shifting from voice to multimedia services. There is a growing interest in providing and improving radio coverage for mobile phones, short range radios and WLANs inside buildings. The need of such coverage appears mainly in office buildings, shopping malls, train stations where the subscriber density is very high. The cost of cellular systems and also the one of indoor wireless systems depend highly on the number of base stations required to achieve the desired coverage for a given level of field strength. There are already numerous optimization methods published which can be applied to the optimal design of such indoor networks. The recently published methods use any heuristic technique for finding the optimal Access Point (AP) positions. Common drawbacks of the methods are the slow convergence in a complex environment like the indoor one.