Indoor Radio Planning: A Practical Guide for GSM, DCS, UMTS, HSPA and LTE, Second Edition

4.8 Using Repeaters for Indoor DAS Coverage

A dedicated base station is often used to find indoor DAS solutions. This is a relatively easy and straightforward approach; you simply dedicate a base station with specific capacity and resources to the indoor DAS. Selecting this type of an approach using a dedicated base station is an easy choice for DAS solutions that demands medium to high capacity. The decision is made by evaluating the potential new traffic when implementing the solution (see Chapter 6) and evaluating the business case based on this evaluation, comparing the investment of base station and DAS plus the supporting transmission, power supply, installation, etc. It is a fact that all Indoor DAS solutions should be implemented based on a business case evaluation (see Section 5.1). However, sometimes it turns out that the traffic in the indoor area that requires coverage improvement does not justify the deployment of a new base station with all the cost associated with this, as well as the backhaul/transmission and upgrade on network elements that supports this new base station.

Where you need only to improve coverage and not add significant capacity inside the building then feeding the DAS with an off air repeater could often be a viable option.

Repeaters typically serve the purpose of providing sufficient signal level inside a building, providing dominance inside a building that lacks single server dominance and in general to improve the data throughput of the service ...