Efficient Universal Indoor Multicharacteristic Propagation model for indoor environments

Accurate indoor radio propagation modelling is a well-known problem that researchers tend to solve in many ways. Related methods differ in terms of accuracy and complexity. The article’s contribution is a new stochastic propagation model, Universal Indoor Multicharacteristic Propagation (UIMP), which results are statistically consistent with those measured in a real environment. The model could be used to verify real- world applications due to the low computational complexity and high accuracy level compared to state-of-the-art methods. This method can be especially beneficial for the efficient modelling of complex environments shared by many users using discrete events simulations (DES) based on a series of measurements in a real environment. In the article, we describe the method and present how to establish the model. The motivation was to develop an efficient method for use in an actual application: using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signal to estimate the position of users in indoor environments – the use of the proposed UIMP model allowed for a reliable assessment of the developed functionalities. Therefore we also present how the model was used to evaluate an example, real functionality, showing that the use of simplified models may falsify the assessment of the analyzed method and may lead e.g. to incorrect implementation assumptions.