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Energy-efficient buildings are gaining momentum in order to comply with the new energy regulations. Especially in northern cold countries, thick reinforced walls and energyefficient windows composed of several layers of glass plus metal coating are becoming the de facto elements in modern building constructions, and it has been noticed that they can impact heavily on radio signal propagation. This paper presents a measurement-based analysis of the outdoor-to-indoor attenuation experienced in several modern constructions compared to an old building. The measurements are performed for frequencies from 800 MHz to 18 GHz with the aim of identifying the frequency dependence and the impact of the new materials on not only the cellular frequency bands used today (mainly below 3 GHz), but also the potential future bands (above 3 GHz). The results show a material dependent and a frequency dependent attenuation, with an average increase of 20-25 dB in modern constructions compared to the old construction, which presents a low and almost constant attenuation below 10 dB. The different measurement results and observations presented along the paper are useful for future radio network planning considerations.

The 3.5 GHz band is a strong candidate for future urban micro cell deployment with base station antennas located below rooftop. Compared to other frequency bands, propagation in the 3.5 GHz band is relatively unexplored for the micro cell deployment. This paper presents a measurement-based analysis of outdoor and outdoor-to-indoor propagation at 3.5 GHz in comparison to the more well-known frequency of 1.9 GHz. A simple two-slope line-of-sight/non-line-of-sight outdoor path loss model is proposed and compared to different existing path loss models. The outdoor path loss is found to be approximately 5 dB higher for 3.5 GHz compared to 1.9 GHz. The outdoor-to-indoor propagation is investigated for two office buildings and different street shops. For the different presented scenarios, penetration loss increases with frequency and is found to be up to 5 dB higher for 3.5 GHz compared with 1.9 GHz. Although some existing models predict the observations with good accuracy, we propose a model based on line-of-sight probability that is simpler and easier to apply.

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In this paper HSPA Release 6 femto and IEEE 802.11g WiFi indoor data solutions are investigated from an end user perspective. Femto and WiFi access points are deployed at typical locations in an urban environment and end user performance is measured. Three key performance indicators (KPI) were defined -downlink and uplink user data rates, latency and mobile power consumption. These three KPIs are of high importance when choosing an indoor data solution. Our measurements show that the downlink and uplink data rates of the WiFi solution are significantly higher than femto data rates. Similarly, latency results show that WiFi outperforms the femto solution. Especially, the radio resource control (RRC) connection set-up time increases the latency for the femto. In terms of idle power consumption the best results are obtained when the mobile camps on the femto. Whereas, WiFi performs best in all active mode power consumption measurements. Based on our KPIs, the preferred indoor data solution today is WiFi. The deciding factor is the combined latency and power performance of the WiFi, where WiFi outperforms the femto.