Path Loss Measurements of Indoor LTE System for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides communication service for future smart manufacturing, which is capable of independently exchanging and responding to information to manage industrial production processes. For the purpose of connecting machines, devices, sensors, and people with each other in a factory, reliable and scalable communication networks used in the cellular IoT are of great importance. This paper aims at channel parameter measurements of indoor Long Term Evolution systems in order to achieve good coverage and service reliability (SR) for the IoT. For the purpose of determining the path loss exponent and the standard deviation of the received shadow fading signal, we use software defined radio techniques to build a small cell experimental platform which contains an evolved node B and user equipment. Received power measurements were performed on this platform. Finally, based on the experimental results, the modified path loss model and the calculated fade margin (FM) for 90% SR are exploited to predict the coverage range of the small cell base station deployed in the factory. The measured path loss channel models are compared with International Telecommunication Union (ITU) path loss channel model.