WiSE - A Wireless System Engineering Tool
Steven J. Fortune
David M. Gay
Brian W. Kernighan
Orlando Landron
Reinaldo A. Valenzuela
Margaret H. Wright
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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