The impact of human movement on 2.4 GHz link quality in indoor space

Network planning frequently ignores the impact of humans on signal propagation. We conducted research as a part of this study to quantify the propagation losses caused by humans in an indoor environment. The initial hypothesis assumes that, apart from the population size, the level of human movement also influences transmission degradation. As part of the research, 60 measures were taken for three distinct scenarios, including various levels of movement: low, medium, and high. The number of individuals involved in each scenario ranged from 1 to 20. The experiments were conducted at a frequency of 2.4 GHz to assess the impact of people’s movement on the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio and received signal strength. The results show that, under a low-movement scenario, the mean signal-to-noise ratio deterioration is 5.97%; however, in a high-movement scenario, this degradation escalates to 23.82%. Once the initial hypothesis was confirmed for determining the propagation losses caused by humans, various supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques were employed for every particular scenario. The obtained findings will be utilized to develop a novel propagation model, providing a practical implementation of study outcomes.