Measurement and Characterization of Satellite-to-Indoor Radio Wave Propagation Channel

Despite of the great advances in Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, millions of people still cannot be located when they are in indoor environment. The signal transmitted from the Navstar satellites experiences severe attenuation while penetrating all the construction materials. The characteristics of the indoor propagation is still not well understood and the question whether the GPS signals indoor are good enough for positioning is still open. The challenge is to find a suitable statistical model of the indoor propagation that gives further insight on multipath behavior and fading distributions. In this paper, we present the analysis of indoor channel propagation based on real measurement data collected in typical office environments. The goal is twofold: first, we present the fading characteristics, such as the signal levels and fading distribution. Second, we present the analysis of multipath propagation with an emphasis on the closely-spaced path issue.