Indoor Propagation and Network Planning including MIMO using Winprop
WinProp is a comprehensive and leading simulation tool in the domain of wireless propagation and radio network planning. The workflow for a typical indoor propagation simulation is to use WallMan to create the geometry, Feko or AMan to produce the antenna pattern and ProMan to simulate the model and view the results.
Network Planning
Whether the scenario is indoor, urban or rural, a network planning simulation can be regarded as postprocessing of a propagation simulation. For network planning, the air interface (for example, CDMA, OFDM) are to be defined with parameters related to carriers (number, bandwidth, separation), transmission modes, coding, required signal-to -noise-and-interference ratio at the receiver. This information may be loaded from a file with extension (.wst) or defined manually. The inclusion of the receiver antenna pattern is a post-processing step. When no receiver antenna pattern is specified, the received-power plots in the areas of interest are based on a hypothetical isotropic receiver antenna and only the transmitter antenna is specified.
MIMO
WinProp can also be used to simulate multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in a network-planning project. In this simulation, every base-station antenna element is explicitly defined in the project. For every base-station antenna element, user has to specify which carrier it will use, which signal group it will transmit, and, in case of MIMO, which MIMO stream it will transmit. At the receiver side, it is assumed that the number of receiver antenna elements is at least as high as the number of MIMO streams. The simulation results will include network-planning quantities like data rate, throughput and many more.
For detailed steps, please refer to the video and files attached below with this blog. For more details and questions please reach out to Altair support.