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

This is Not a Book for Scientists

This book is intended for the RF planners, to serve as a practical tool in their daily work designing indoor radio distribution systems. It is not a complete book about all the deep aspects and corners of GSM, DCS, UMTS and HSPA networks, or all the core network systems. It is dedicated to the last 10–70 m of the network, the indoor air interface between the mobile user and the indoor mobile network.

I have spent the past 20 years working on various parts of the exciting business of cellular communication. During this time I have mostly focused on the planning of the radio interface between the network and the mobile user, with a dedicated focus on indoor radio planning. I have always tried to approach that small part of the systems that involved me, the radio interface, from a practical angle. I have struggled with most of the books available on these subjects mainly due to a theoretical level far beyond my needs. My hope with this book is to present a level of theory that is usable and accessible for a radio planner with basic radio experience.

I also need to emphasize that no matter the radio platform or standard, GSM, UMTS, HSPA or 4G, as long as the interface between the mobile and the network uses radio communication, it will always be a matter of a link calculation with a given signal-to-noise ratio for a given service requirement. After all, it is ‘just’ radio planning.