Study of the Effect of Construction Materials of Residential Buildings on GSM Signal Strength at 900 MHz in Perspective of Bangladesh

摘要

Cellphone signal level often drops to a significant amount inside a building resulting in call drops though the signal level is strong outside. This happens due to the penetration loss, experienced by the GSM signals as they pass through the building materials that are not transparent to them. Mainly penetration loss, along with the path loss, degrades the received signal strength level (RSSI) inside a building. In this work, the measurements of the received GSM signal strength level (RSSI) were made, outside and inside a 4-floored multi-storied building and a tin-shed single-floored building, which represent the prevalent types of buildings in all the cities in Bangladesh. An Android phone, with a Teletalk 2G (GSM-900) SIM and Network Signal Info application installed in it, was used as the measurement tool for this purpose. The obtained results show a mean average penetration loss of 19.29 dBm and 21.43 dBm for the multi-storied building and the single-floored building respectively. Besides, this work also consists of study of the penetration loss effect of several prevalent building construction materials on the electromagnetic (EM) signals at 900 MHz. This work will help the network service providers in carrying out efficient site-specific network planning in Bangladesh.