Measurements of Building Attenuation in 450 MHz LTE Networks

TL;DR

This study measures how 450 MHz LTE signals attenuate indoors across different buildings, revealing high variability influenced by building type, indoor location, and floor height, which is crucial for smart grid applications.

Contribution

It introduces a custom measurement device and software for assessing indoor LTE attenuation at 450 MHz, enabling non-experts to conduct such measurements easily.

Findings

Building attenuation varies significantly across different structures.

Indoor position and floor height greatly influence signal attenuation.

Results inform deployment strategies for 450 MHz LTE in indoor environments.

Abstract

This work reports on a measurement study to estimate the attenuation of 450 MHz LTE networks. The LTE band 72 is currently deployed in Germany, in particular for smart grid applications. Due to this use-case, we assume that a significant amount of future devices will be deployed stationary and indoor which motivated our campaign. We designed a custom measurement device which uses commercial off-the-shelf hardware to assess the downlink RSRP of a public mobile network. In addition, a software has been developed to provide non-experts the possibility to conduct these measurements in the future. This software provides the possibility to determine the indoor position based on ground plans. We conducted measurements at three different buildings. Our results reveal, that the building attenuation of 450 MHz LTE networks is highly heterogeneous and mainly depends on the type of the building, the indoor position and in particular the height of the floor where the device is located.