Optimized Indoor Wireless Propagation Model in
WiFi-RoF Network Architecture for RSS-Based
Localization in the Internet of Things
Xi Shen, Kun Xu, Xiaoqiang Sun, Jian Wu and Jintong Lin
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics & Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
P.O.BOX 55, 10th Xitucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100876, P.R.China
xukun@bupt.edu.cn
Abstract—This paper innovatively proposes an indoor wireless
propagation model in WiFi radio-over-fiber network architecture
for received signal strength (RSS) based localization in the
Internet of Things. The proposed model adds attenuation terms
of obstacles in each sub-space by dividing the room into several
sub-spaces according to the obstacles’ distribution. The influence
of obstacles in sub-space on the indoor wireless propagation
model is theoretically analyzed and the optimized model has been
experimentally demonstrated to give exactly prediction of real-
world RSS values in 62.5% of the testing points, which shows
that the proposed model outperforms the original one.
Keywords—indoor propagation model; internet of things; radio-
over-fiber; received signal strength; WiFi
I. INTRODUCTION
The increasing mobile WiFi devices have made the indoor
localization an attractive research point especially for the
Internet of Things applications [1-3]. Since Global Positing
System (GPS) does not perform well in the indoor
environment [4], several indoor localization approaches have
been proposed in the past years [5-7]. Recently, since no
additional hardware is needed and it is available in most of the
standard WiFi devices, received signal strength (RSS) based
indoor localization approaches get more and more attention.
Traditional indoor RSS localization systems always use the
existing wireless local area network infrastructure and the
solution is to improve the accuracy of RSS localization models
in which walls’ and floors’ attenuation have been considered
inevitably in the wireless propagation models [8,9]. Radio-
over-Fiber technique has emerged to be a promising solution
to the hybrid wireless-optical home access networks due to its
functionally simple architecture and cost effective remote
antenna unit (RAU) which can be installed in the room closer
to the users compared to the traditional WiFi infrastructure
[10-12]. The difference of traditional WiFi network
architecture and WiFi-RoF network architecture leads that the
original wireless propagation model which contains
attenuation introduced by walls and floors is not suitable in
WiFi-RoF network architecture. In order to get accuracy
prediction of real-world RSS values, the indoor wireless
propagation model need to be amended. This paper, for the
first time to our knowledge, proposes an indoor wireless
propagation model in WiFi-RoF network architecture for RSS-
based localization in the IOT. The proposed model adds the
This work was supported in part by National 973 Program
(2012CB315705), 863 Program (2011AA010306), NSFC Program ( 60736002,
60837004, 60736036, 60932004 and 61001121), the 111 Project under Grant
B07005, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Beijing
Excellent Doctoral Thesis Project under Grant YB20101001301, and the
Cooperation Project between Province and Ministries under Grant
2010B090400112.
978-1-61284-718-4/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
attenuation terms of obstacles in each sub-space by dividing
the room into several sub-spaces according to the distribution
of obstacles. An overview of WiFi-RoF network architecture
and the influence of obstacles in sub-space on the indoor
wireless propagation model are theoretically analyzed in
Section II and the proposed improved model has been
experimentally demonstrated in Section III. The conclusions
are drawn in Section IV.
II. WIFI-ROF NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR INDOOR
LOCALIZATION
A. WiFi-RoF network architecture
Figure 1 depicts WiFi-RoF network architecture for indoor
localization, in which a star topology with adjacent RAUs
connected to the common control station via optical fibers. All
RAUs can hang from the ceiling of each room. Besides of this,
the RoF network is transparent to any RF signal, which is
modulated the laser diode in the control station and
reproduced at the photodiode in the RAU. The complexity
modulation and processing is moved to the control station,
simplifying the RAUs. Traditional indoor localization systems
always use the wireless local area network infrastructure,
depicted in Fig. 2. In the traditional WiFi network
architecture, the access point was deployed in one room and
the signal can cover a wide range of the area, especially more
than one rooms. So walls’ and floors’ attenuation must be
considered inevitably in the indoor wireless propagation
models. When an electromagnetic wave propagates and
encounters objects, such as walls and floors, the reflections,
diffraction, and scattering are produced. The RSS will be
influenced not only by the distance, but also by the obstacles
between the transmitter and the receiver. Moreover, the multi-
path effect will also influence it. Thus RSS are sensitive to the
upper factors and these should be minimized as much as
possible.
By deploying the WiFi-RoF network architecture, one
RAU can hang from the ceiling in each room. Moreover in
this situation, there are no walls and floors between the
transmitter and the receiver. Thus based on WiFi-RoF network
architecture, the attenuation introduced by walls and floors
does not need to be considered in the indoor wireless
propagation model.
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Fig. 1. WiFi-RoF network architecture.
Fig. 2. Traditional WiFi network architecture.
B. Sub-space based indoor wireless propagation model
The basic path-loss model considered here is a further
generalization of one-slop model adding an attenuation term
due the losses introduced by walls and floors penetrated by the
direct path [9].
PL(d ) = PL(d0 ) +10n1 log(d ) +WAF + FAF
(1)
Where:
- PL(d) is the path-loss at the distance of d in dB;
- PL(d0) is the free space path-loss at the distance of d0 in dB;
- d0 is the reference distance in meters, typically 1m in the
indoor environment;
- n1 is the air attenuation factor in dB/meter;
- d is the distance between the transmitter and the receiver in
meters;
- WAF and FAF are the wall attenuation factor and the floor
attenuation factor respectively.
Conversion from path-loss to an RSS is derived as:
RSS ( d ) = Pt − PL (d ) (2)
Where RSS(d) is the received signal strength at the distance of
d and Pt is the transmitted power in dBm.
Common building materials and the corresponding
attenuation are depicted in Table I [8]. It is notable that the
loss introduced by walls and floors is bigger than others. Only
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TABLE I. Attenuation of Different Materials
Material Attenuation
(dB)
Windows in brick wall 2 to 3
Metal frame, glass wall into building 6
Office wall 6
Metal door 6 to 12.4
Brick wall next to metal door 3
Cinderblock wall 4 to 6
Plasterboard 3 to 5
Structural concrete wall 6 to 15
if to actually measure the wall, we can not get the accurate
attenuation value but a dynamic range.
In traditional WiFi network architecture, attenuation
introduced by walls and floors must be taken into
consideration in the indoor wireless propagation model. But
due to the numerous types of walls and floors, it is
impracticable to measure the attenuation introduced by walls
and floors one by one for saving much time and human
resource purpose. And only rough predicted RSS value can be
get, which will influence the localization accuracy in the
second localization algorithms phase. In WiFi-RoF network
architecture, attenuation of walls and floors can be decreased
by installing one antenna in each room. Naturally, the
attenuation has transferred to that of the obstacles in the room.
This paper, for the first time to our knowledge, proposes an
indoor wireless propagation model in WiFi-RoF network
architecture, which adds the attenuation terms of obstacles by
dividing the room into several sub-spaces according to the
distribution of obstacles. The improved model is derived as:
PL(d) = PL(d0 ) +10n1 log(d) + OBSSSi (d)
(3)
Where OBSSSi(d) is the attenuation factor, which is caused by
the obstacles in sub-space i.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The experimental results obtained from propagation
measurements are reported in this section. A wireless laptop
with this configuration (Intel Dual-Core CPU @ 2.1 GHz; 2
GB RAM; MS Windows XP Professional) was used in the
experiment. The wireless adapter was Intel PRO wireless
3945BG network connection card, and the access point was
NETGEAR WG103 whose output signal is modulated by a
 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE MWP

TABLE II. RSS Values of Testing Points in Different Sub-Spaces

Testing Sub-space RAU-Rx RSS value

points distance (dBm)
(meter)
1 2.5456 -33
2 1.3416 -28
3 i 1.3416 -33
4 3 -35
5 3.4986 -39
6 3 -38
7 ii 6.2642 -46
8 4.8374 -43
9 5.4 -49
10 7.225 -47
11 iii 10.8167 -60
12 13.3222 -59
13 11.0309 -54
14 11.8186 -56
15 iv 12.8825 -59
16 14.0456 -61

obstacles. Take sub-space iv for example, the RSS value

Fig. 3. Layout of the laboratory and the measurement locations.
directly modulated laser and transmitted via optical fiber to the
RAU.
A. Experimental Setup
rd
A measurement was conducted in our laboratory in the 3
teaching building in BUPT. It is a typical office environment
with desks, chairs, computers, laboratory instruments, and
cabinets. The area is approximately 10m by 17m. It is an
electromagnetic interference environment due to the
interference from electronic devices. Fig. 3 shows the layout
of our laboratory and the deployment of the RAU.
Every RSS value was averaged over a set of 100 samples
and the RSS value was measured by the laptop placed at the
height of 0.7m on a moving desk. The experiment was
conducted after hours to minimize the impact of the movement
of people. And we repeated the experiment five times to
maximize the correctness of the data. One reference points is
used to set the transmitted power of antenna in WiFi network
architecture and that in the WiFi-RoF network architecture,
maintaining the RSS value at the reference point equals in the
two network architectures. The transmitted value Pt is used in
the above mentioned models to predict the RSS values.
B. Experimental Results
The experimental results for several testing points in
different positions are summarized in Table II. The testing
points, the corresponding belonged sub-spaces, and the
separated distance are shown in column 1, 2, and 3
respectively. The RSS values are shown in column 4. In each
sub-space, four testing points are chosen for measurement.
As shown in Table II, the RSS value decrease as the RAU-
Rx distance increases in the sub-space where there is no
decrease from -54 dBm to -61 dBm for testing points #13, #14,
#15, and #16. However, this observation is not valid for
testing points in different sub-spaces e.g. sub-space i. Testing
point #2 and testing point #3 are the same far away from RAU,
but the RSS values are not the same. Because the attenuation
caused by obstacles is not the same although they are the same
far away from the RAU. The same is true for testing point #4
and testing point #6. Intuitively, we can understand that the
improved model with space subdivision is necessary for
modeling the propagation of wireless signals in the indoor
environment.
Figure 4 depicts the RSS values for different testing points.
There are ten testing points where the prediction of RSS value
by the improved model equals to the measured value. But the
original model only gives exactly prediction of the RSS value
in three testing points. That is to say, the improved model
gives exactly prediction of real-world RSS values in 62.5% of
the testing points, but the original model only gives exactly
prediction in 18.75% of these testing points. From the
comparison, the improved indoor wireless propagation model
performs significantly better than the original model.
The deviation of measured RSS values for different
testing points is shown in Fig. 5. It is observed that the
variance of the RSS values of the original model vary much
more significantly than that of the improved model. Moreover,
the testing points from #11 to #14 have much more deviation
than other testing points due to their longer distance between
the antenna than others and the non light-of-sight (LOS)
transmission. In this non LOS transmission, the improved
model gives more accuracy prediction of real-world RSS
values than the original one-slope model. Thus the accuracy of
the improved model is obvious.

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 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE MWP
Fig. 4. RSS values for different testing points.
Fig. 5. Deviation of measured RSS values to theory models for different
testing points.
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper innovatively proposes an indoor wireless
propagation model in WiFi-RoF network architecture for RSS-
based localization in the Internet of Things. The proposed
model adds the attenuation terms of obstacles in each sub-
space by dividing the room into several sub-spaces according
277
to the distribution of obstacles. The influence of obstacles in
sub-space on the indoor wireless propagation model is
theoretically analyzed and the proposed improved model has
been experimentally demonstrated to give exactly prediction
of real-world RSS values in 62.5% of the testing points, which
shows that the proposed model outperforms the original one.
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