International Hellenic University

Exercise on planning indoors wireless

communication systems
Liaskos Christos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Dr. George Koutitas (International Hellenic
University)

User's Guide

Intoduction

This leaflet describes the GUI controls comprising the indoors network planning (wireless)
exercise. This is intended for familiarization with the GUI and its use only. For more
information on the actual physical computations and employed metrics and procedures,
please refer to the course books and instructors of the "Wireless Communications" course of
the International Hellenic University. The computations-related code and data is a courtesy
of Dr. George Koutitas (g.koutitas@ihu.edu.gr).

Requirements

A x86 or x64 compatible PC, with 4GB of RAM, with Microsoft Windows 7 OS and
MATLAB 2009b installed. Other windows-based OSes may work, provided that they are
compatible. A PDF document format viewer is required for viewing the documentation.

Installation

1. When installing the whole package of the virtual labs, the current exercise is also
automatically included and is available through the vlabs launcher GUI, or through the
MATLAB start menu, as is described at the installation notes. This also gives access to the
full documentation via the MATLAB help system.

2. When installing the exercise as a standalone package, (a simple .zip file), uncompress to a
folder of your liking. This concludes the package installation. Notice that the MATLAB help
system for the vlabs is not installed automatically in this way. Follow the corresponding
procedure for installing the help components.

This concludes the installation.

Running the application

At any point, issue "vlabsselectgui" at the MATLAB command prompt for the vlabs
selection and execution GUI to appear. Alternatively, go to the "START/I.H.U. Wireless
Comm Vlabs" entry and execute the GUI selector graphically. When installing the exercise as
a standalone package, make the install path the current active MATLAB directory and issue
"indoors" at the command line. The following form will appear:

*As opposed to the single-installation, which installs one vlab only and is covered by the
corresponding vlab documentation. In this case the installation files comprise of a single ZIP
file, typically named "VLABSX_PnR.zip", where X is a number 1..9.
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Figure 1- The "indoors planning" exercise main GUI. The application starts with the scenario 1 by default (one
fixed transmitter). Use the menu option "Pick a scenario" to activate scenario 2 (multiple transmitters). The
GUI changes as shown in the figure.

Explaining the setup

The exercise takes place on an arbitrary floor of a building. The schematics of this floor are
shown at the bottom of the main form. In this space, one or several transmitters are placed,
and field, coverage, modulation and efficiency measurements are taken at specific points,
across user defined lines, or on the whole floor. Notice that the measurements take into
account realistic field E/M propagation phenomena such as reflection, diffraction and
scattering. These data have been pre-calculated via ray-tracing algorithms by Dr. George
Koutitas (g.koutitas@ihu.edu.gr). (This however has an impact on the application's
initialization and memory usage: hundreds of MBs are read when the application is
executed-taking 1-2 minutes to load from the hard disk drive-and are kept in RAM for the
duration of the exercise).

Notice the horizontal tree structure of the GUI components comprising the two scenarios: At
the leftmost part of the tree (root), parameters are set. Setting a parameter affects the child
nodes bellow it. After the vertical, gray separator the measurements/illustrations that
correspond to a parameter selection path are given. The blue panel at the rightmost part
denotes selection of data that may be exported to Microsoft Excel for further processing.

Two scenarios are employed:

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The first scenario assumes one static, non configurable transmitter

transmitter, denoted with
the green cross at the bottom left legend. The user may freely place a single
stationary receiver (non
(non-configurable)
configurable) on the floor, or define a horizontal/vertical
movement path of a slowly moving receiver (its speed is assumed to be
insignificant). This selection takes place by clicking on the "Pick an Rx point" and
"Pick an Rx line" buttons on the top of the form, and freely selecting via mouse clicks
one point, ore two points defining a line. The corresponding graphics are updated
automatically.

The user may choose the number of ray interactions. This is best explained at the
following figure:

Figure 2 - Ray Interactions

When a ray leaves the transmitter and hits an obstacle for the first time, diffraction
occurs: part of the wave traverses the obstacle, while another part is reflected. Both
resulting rays follow different paths. The diffraction is called an interaction. TheT
diffraction results into a splitting of the original ray. The newly created second path
is called 2nd generation ray. This process is then continued for both paths, resulting
into more collisions and thus more generations of ray paths. By sliding the
Interactions
teractions slider, the user may choose the number of ray generations that are
taken into account in the various calculations. A maximum of 8 generations can be
taken into account. The more the generations, the more accurate the results.

The user may then choose a number of illustrations and measurements to be

executed/taken. The topmost button action button "PDP at point" will plot the ray
paths, provide a colormap representing the received power over the floor, and plot
the power delay profile. This is illustrated in Fig. 3. The child-action
action "..for selected
interaction" will produce the same plots but form the selected generation (denoted
by the exact value of the slider) of rays ONLY.
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Figure 3 - The PDP for sigle point action

action-related
related illustration of ray generations and received power.

The final action for scenario 1 takes the same measurements across the user defined
red line. The k-factor
factor and rmsT are produced and plotted as functions of the traveled
distance across the line (the firstly selected point is the point with zero distance). A
typical produced illustration is given in Fig. 4.

Figure 4 Typical illustrations for the line measurements of scenario 1.

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By enabling the "Export to excel" feature, the user may export some of the
illustrated data to Microsoft Excel for further processing:

Figure 5 - Eanbling the Export to Excel feature for the 2nd scenario

The descriptive
iptive text in the blue frame gives the nature of the exported data, as well
as their order of columns in the produced spreadsheet. Notice that the export takes
place after the execution of an action (e.g. clicking on the "PDP single receiver"
button).

Figure 6 - Sample exported data.

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Notice that the Excel

application will show up only if it already installed locally on the
computer, and has the ".csv" file extension related directly to it for automatic opening and
processing.

The second scenario is illustrated at the bottom right legend of the main form.form In
this case, 53 possible transmitters are available. Click on any of the to enable it (i.e.
set it to transmit state). Blackened transmit
transmitters
ters denote inactive ones. Once a
blackened transmitter is clicked, its color changes to green, and its ID is shown next
to it in red. This denotes that the transmitter is active.

The user may also configure the Tx Power and Gain of the transmitters. Simply
Sim click
on the "Setup Txs" button, right below the "SCENARIO 2" text. the following table
will show up:

Figure 7 - Editing Transmitters in Scenario 2.

Click on any cell and enter any numeric value. When done, close the transmitter
editing form, and the changes will apply automatically.

The parameters' tree follows four distinct paths on this scenario: indoors planning
for a generic, modulation agnostic network, examining only generic physical metrics,
metrics
a network assuming OFDM modulation and related efficiency measurements based
on Monte Carlo simulations, and a CDMA network. Examining the theory behind
these topics goes beyond this user guide. The data export and related explanation is
identical to
o that of the scenario 1.

Notice that clicking on each action of the 2nd scenario results into different
illustrations. The
e produce figures include coverage, received field, adaptive
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modulation efficiency and best server per cell plots. These have been conceptually
covered in the main vlabs. Some sample produced figures are given bellow:

Figure 8 - Generic Network Illustrations

Figure 9 - CDMA illustrations

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Figure 10 - Monte Carlo simulation results.

Especially for the Monte Carlo experiments you may refer to [1].

This concludes the user guide.

REFERENCES

[1]. Doucet, Arnaud; Freitas, Nando de; Gordon, Neil (2001). Sequential Monte Carlo
methods in practice. New York: Springer. ISBN 0387951466.