Wireless Performance Evaluation of Building Layouts: Closed-Form Computation of Figures of Merit

This paper presents a part of our ground-breaking work on evaluation of buildings in terms of wireless friendliness at the building-design stage. The main goal is to devise building design practices that provide for a good performance of wireless networks deployed in buildings. In this paper, the interference gain (IG) and power gain (PG) are defined as two figures of merit (FoM) of the wireless performance of buildings. The FoMs bridge the gap between building design and wireless communications industries. An approach to derive exact closed-form equations for these FoMs is proposed for the first time. The derived analytic expressions facilitate straightforward and more computationally efficient numerical evaluation of the proposed FoMs as compared to Monte Carlo simulations for well-known indoor propagation models. It is shown that the derived closed-form expression can be readily employed to evaluate the impact of building properties, such as the sizes and the aspect ratios (ARs) of rooms, on the wireless performance. The proposed approach sheds light to architects on evaluation and design of wireless-friendly building layouts.