WiSE - A Wireless System Engineering Tool
Steven J. Fortune
David M. Gay
Brian W. Kernighan
Orlando Landron
Reinaldo A. Valenzuela
Margaret H. Wright
AT&T Bell Laboratories
Copyright (c) 1995 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,
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This paper is a preliminary version of the article
WISE Design of Indoor Wireless Systems, which appeared in
IEEE Computational Science and Engineering,
2, 1, pp. 58-68 (Spring, 1995).
Published by the IEEE Computer Society, 10662 Los Vaqueros Circle, Los
Alamitos, CA 90720, USA, TEL +1-714-821-8380, FAX +1-714-821-4010.
Abstract
Indoor wireless communication systems--cordless and cellular phones,
pagers, wireless networks,
active tags and badges--are increasingly popular,
and several business units are interested in design tools.
This paper describes WiSE, a system for designing indoor
and microcell (``campus'') wireless systems:
Prediction:
Given building data (wall locations and composition),
system parameters, and base-station
locations, WiSE determines
system performance (e.g., received power, delay spread)
throughout the building or at specific points.
Through improved geometric algorithms
prediction run-times
depend more on the number of useful rays
than on the exponential number of possible rays.
Optimization:
Given parameters and system requirements (e.g.,
signal strength threshold), WiSE determines base-station locations to maximize
the fraction of the building over which the performance
requirement is met.
Interaction:
The WiSE user interface displays plan, elevation
and perspective views of a building,
and shows signal strength throughout the building.
Parameters can be adjusted and base-station
and portable locations can be
set interactively.
The figure below shows predicted coverage of
a small office building with two base stations.
The color scale shows local mean signal strength
at each location, and illustrates some of the
non-obvious patterns caused by reflections off
walls, floor and ceiling.
WiSE has been used for
a wide variety of buildings, from
small office suites to large buildings like AT&T's Middletown facility
and the New York Stock Exchange.
Predictions have been validated with local mean signal strength
measurements in three AT&T office buildings;
prediction error has been within 6 dB in both mean and standard deviation.
WiSE runs on Unix systems with X-Windows and (in a more restricted
and preliminary form) on PC's under Microsoft Windows.
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