As wireless communications use increases, radio frequency (RF) coverage within buildings and signal penetration into buildings from outside transmitting sources has quickly become an important design issue for wireless engineers who must design and deploy cellular telephone systems, paging systems, or new wireless systems and technologies such as personal communication networks or wireless local area networks. Designers are frequently requested to determine if a radio transceiver location or a base station cell site can provide reliable service throughout a city, an office, a building, an arena or a campus. A common problem for wireless systems is inadequate coverage, or a “dead zone,” in a specific location, such as a conference room.
There are many computer aided design (CAD) products on the market that can be used to design the environment for a wireless system. WiSE from Lucent Technology, Inc., SignalPro from EDX, PLAnet by Mobile Systems International, Inc., and TEMS and TEMS Light from Ericsson are examples of wireless CAD products. In practice, however, a pre-existing building or campus is designed on paper (e.g. blueprints) and may be input in to a CAD product to create CAD drawings of the environment. Once the design is input into a CAD product, the CAD product represents the environment in electronic form, which allows the designer to then manipulate the electronic form to plan for efficient design. However, many times the paper blueprints and/or the CAD drawings are not available and/or do not exist.
If the paper blueprints and/or CAD drawings do not exist or are difficult to obtain, then there is no way for the designer to utilize design tools that optimize the wireless system for the environment. Without being able to utilize design tools, a network designer is not able to build a wireless system easily, efficiently, and inexpensively.
Accordingly there exists a new method and apparatus for utilizing RF signals to create a site specific representation of an environment.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions with respect to their corresponding respective areas of inquiry and study except where specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.