Measurement and Comparison of Wi-Fi and Super Wi-Fi Indoor Propagation Characteristics in a Multi-Floored Building

Abstract

Super Wi-Fi is a Wi-Fi-like service exploiting TV white space (WS) which is expected to achieve larger coverage than today’s Wi-Fi thanks to its superior propagation characteristics. Super Wi-Fi has been materialized as an international standard, IEEE 802.11af, targeting indoor and outdoor applications, and is undergoing worldwide field tests. This paper demonstrates the true potential of indoor Super Wi-Fi, by experimentally comparing the signal propagation characteristics of Super WiFi and Wi-Fi in the same indoor environment. Specifically, we measured the wall and floor attenuation factors and the pathloss distribution at 770 MHz, 2.401 GHz, and 5.540 GHz, and predicted the downlink capacity of Wi-Fi and Super Wi-Fi. The experimental results have revealed that TVWS signals can penetrate up to two floors above and below, whereas Wi-Fi signals experience significant path loss even through a single floor. It has been also shown that Super Wi-Fi mitigates shaded regions of Wi-Fi by providing almost-homogeneous data rates within its coverage, performs comparable to Wi-Fi utilizing less bandwidth, and always achieves better spectral efficiency than Wi-Fi. The observed phenomena imply that Super Wi-Fi is suitable for indoor applications and has the potential of extending horizontal and vertical coverage of today’s Wi-Fi.