OPTIMIZATION GEOMETRIC MODELING ELECTROMAGNETICS

WISE Design of Indoor Wireless

Systems:
Practical Computation and Optimization
Steven 3. Fortune, David M. Gay, Brian F Kernighun, Orlando K Landron, Reinaldo A. Vulenzuelu, and Margaret H. Wright AT&T Bell Laboratories

WAL-MART or Bloomingdales-that wants to equip salespeople with portable pointof-sale terminals so they can serve customers anywhere in the building. Imagine workers in a large warehouse sending inventory updates to a central database with wireless palmtop computers or bar-code wands. Imagine a supermarket with shelf tags that can receive signals from and send signals to base stations in the ceiling. Imagine a convention center or a large office building with continually changing network and voice communication needs. In each case, a system that uses indoor radiofrequency transceivers can be a cost-effective way to provide mobility and easy rearrangement, far more flexibly than any wired system. Indoor wireless communication systems-cordless and cellular phones, pagers, wireless networks and terminals, and active tags and badges-are increasingly popular. Engineers designing and installing these systems need effective and practical tools to help them devise plans that are properly tailored to each site. Wireless System Engineering (WISE), a software system we have written a t AT&T Bell Laboratories for designing indoor and campus-sized (microcell) wireless systems, is such a tool. It uses algorithms from computational geometry and optimization to decide where to place base-station transceivers to get the best results. Base stations are generally fixed and few in number; they provide the link to the
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communications backbone of the system. Portables, by contrast, tend to be mobile and in principle can be located anywhere; there are likely to be many more of them. They correspond to the instruments that people use-pagers, phones, hand-held terminals, desktop computers. (Base stations and portables are each capable of transmitting and receiving, and all radio computations are symmetric.) Cost really is the critical consideration in most wireless systems; base stations tend to be expensive, so it is well worthwhile to use as few as possible for a given level of performance. WISE interacts with the user to predict, optimize, and produce a cost-effective plan.

+ Prediction: Given building data (wall locations

and composition), system parameters, and user-specified base-station locations, WISE determines system performance (for example, Figure 1. Walls in this curved building affect strength of radio transmisreceived signal power o r delay spread) sions coming from two base stations (blue circles). Colors at each point throughout the building or at specific points. in the building show the signal strength at that point. (The dBm scale Prediction is the basic operation that evalu- measures signal strength in decibels relative to 1 milliwatt; thus -30 ates performance for a specified set of base lo- dBm corresponds to a 1-microwattsignal.) cations and parameters. + Optimization: Given parameters and initial positions of base stations, WISE can use pre- wide variety of buildings, from small office diction to compute a locally optimum solu- suites to large buildings like the New York tion. It does this by moving the base stations Stock Exchange and the Hynes Convention according to a search algorithm to improve Center in Boston. Predictions have been valithe predicted coverage as much as possibledated with measurements of local mean signal that is, to maximize the fraction of the build- strength in several AT&T office buildings. Preing over which a signal-saength or other re- diction error has remained within 6 dB, an acquirement is met. T h e initial base locations ceptable level, in both mean and standard deviacan be selected by the user or even randomly. tion. W I S E runs on Unix systems with X By performing a sequence of optimizations Windows and (in a more restricted and prelimiwith different numbers of bases, WISE can nary form) on PCs under Microsoft Windows. even determine the best number of bases to It is not yet available outside of AT&T, but we use. hope that it will be in the near future. + Interaction: The WISE user interface displays plan, elevation, and perspective views of a The problem building, and shows signal strength throughout the building. Parameters can be adjusted, In general, we want to position base stations and the locations of base stations and porta- carefully so that they cover the building adebles can be set interactively. quately. Thus the most general form of the design problem is: pven a building, where do we Though it is usually used to optimize system position how many base stations of what power performance, WISE can also answer questions to cover the building to a specified minimum like, How well would the system work if we power level at a minimum cost? moved this base station to this other location? The problem is far too complicated for simFigure 1 shows predicted coverage of a small ple approximations. Modern buildings use many office building with transmissions from two materials, and radio signals are subject to attenbase stations. The color scale shows local mean uation, reflection, and the interference and signal strength at each location, and illustrates time-dispersion effects of multipath propagasome of the non-obvious patterns caused by re- tion. Performing experiments on the premises flections off walls, floor, and ceiling. of potential customers is much too timeWISE has been used for experiments in a consuming and expensive; even taking
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measurements is costly and slow. Brute-force solutions with high-power transmitters are infeasible because of cost and public concern over electromagnetic radiation; in any case, the field is too competitive to permit overengineered solutions. W e need a tool that can provide a very good design quickly. The user should be able to enter design parameters and constraints easily; the system should produce a good design that needs little refinement to be useful. Ideally, it should design small systems that work almost out of the box, while large systems should require only limited additional tuning. WISE attacks this combination of problems. It has five major components:

+ Graphical user interj4ace: Finally, a graphical

user interface provides convenient access to these modeling tools. T h e interface displays plan, elevation, and perspective views of a building, upon which it will superimpose all rays among any set of bases and portables, or a complete coverage map with a color scale indicating signal strength. Views may be scaled and panned over. Parameters like wavelength, power levels, antenna types, and so on can be set from popup menus or dialog boxes. Base stations and portable units can be positioned interactively; and the results of previous computations can be displayed for comparison. T h e progress of prediction or optimization may be monitored as it proceeds asynchronously.

at each potential portable-station location.

+ Propagation model: A propagation

model predicts the local mean of signal power received at any given point. For each point, we comWe now describe these components in more pute the scalar sum of the powers of multipath components reaching the specified loca- detail, and report on computational experience. tion. The model includes the effects of angle of incidence, polarization, material dielectric Propagation model constant, and antenna patterns. Predictions can also account for diffraction effects around T h e basic propagation modell makes several corners, which is particularly significant for simplifications. Walls, floors, and ceilings are outdoor microcell environments. assumed to be homogeneous flat surfaces. Each + Physical database acquisition: The building data- distinct type of wall has transmission and reflecbase, that is, the locations and radio charac- tion coefficients derived from a multilayer diteristics of all walls, floors, and ceilings, must electric model; coefficients vary as a function of be acquired and digitized. This involves en- the angle of incidence 8 of an incoming ray. For tering paper or electronic floor plans into a indoor prediction, scattering is assumed to be computer-aided design system, which extracts negligible. Diffraction around corners can be included. Refraction effects are ignored on ray relevant building information. + Propagation prediction: The propagation model paths that propagate through walls, and reis essentially a 3D ray-tracing process that in flected paths obey Snells law, bouncing off a t principle follows all paths from a base station the same angle as they entered. Objects such as to a portable station. A brute-force approach furniture within a room are ignored. Experihere requires far too much computation time ment verifies that such objects usually do not to be feasible for real buildings. Accordingly, severely affect the local mean signal strength we have developed a new algorithm to reduce that WISE predicts, unless they are large and to a manageable level the number of path directly obstruct the propagation path. Large components that have to be evaluated. Our metal shelves extending above antenna height in algorithm focuses on useful rays instead of the a warehouse might have this effect, and could exponential number of possible rays. This then be treated as walls. Many paths generally contribute to the power typically reduces computation time by two orders of m a p t u d e . A signal-coverage map of received at a p e n site. For a path k from a transan entire building with several hundred walls mitter to a receiver site, the power received is can now be computed in less than a minute on a standard workstation. + Base-station optimization: An optimization algorithm determines, for given choices of parameters like transmitter frequency and where a is a function of the antenna patterns, power, receiver sensitivity, and signal-to- wavelength, and initial path direction; Po is the noise ratios, a near-optimum placement of a transmitter power; 1 is the length of the unis specified number of base stations to satisfy folded ray path; and oj the transmission or rerequirements on minimum signal strength flection coefficient of the ith wall along the

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path. T h e predicted local mean of the received power at a site is the scalar sum of the powers of all paths to the site:

Table 1. Error statistics of WISE predictions versus actual measurements of received power in AT&T office buildings. Standard Mean error deviation of (dB) error (dB) 0.1 1.7 4.4 4.1 3.2 4.6 4.2 4.9 5.3
~-

P=XP,
k

Building Crawford Hill (1st floor) Crawford Hill (2nd floor)

Frequency 2 CHz 2 CHz

I.

In principle the sum is over an infinite set, but Crawford Hill (cross-floor) 2 CHz 3.1 signal strength diminishes rapidly with the Crawford Hill (cross-floor) 900 MHz -0.9 number of walls encountered, so in practice we Crawford Hill (line-of-sight) 900 MHz 0.3 restrict the sum to paths that encounter at most Middletown a few walls. 2 CHz 1.9 A building coverage map is obtained by comHolmdel 2 CHz 0.7 puting local mean received power over a dense grid of points throughout the building. A typical grid spacing of a meter or two implies a few assigned the transmission and reflection properthousand computations of received power. ties of the corresponding wall. T h e reflection Careful measurements are needed to validate and transmission properties are determined by a any model of radio prediction. T o establish the multilayer dielectric model for various typiaccuracy of this simplified prediction model, we cal construction materials. T h e wall types curperformed measurements in several buildings. rently in use include Indoor measurement is particularly difficult, since the environment surrounding and interfer- + earth ing with the radio signal has a profound effect + 8-in. concrete partition (cinder block) on how the energy is propagated. Radio waves + sheetrock partition arrive at a receiver via numerous multipath com- + lossy sheetrock partition ponents, each having different delays, strengths, + 1-in. wood partition and phases. These multipath electric field com- + 1-in. wood partition on 8-in. concrete ponents interfere with each other both construc- + 0.5-in. glass partition tively and destructively, so signal strength can be + metallic partition dramatically different at points only a short distance apart. A detailed description of our mea- In addition there are several kinds of concrete surement technique is given elsewhere. walls, with losses ranging from 10 dB to 26 dB. Our measurements included line-of-sight, Walls are either vertical (true walls and partirooms in the same corridor, rooms in adjacent tions) or horizontal (ceilings and floors). T h e corridors, and rooms on different floors. Most wall coordinate data can be generated manually of the measurements were performed at 2 GHz, or electronically. T o create these files manually, although current validation efforts have in- two opposite corners of every plane in a buildcluded 900 MHz as well. W e used a rotating di- ing must be identified and entered into a text pole antenna (2 meters above the floor) to sam- file, an impractical task for most buildings. Alple the instantaneous signal strength about a ternatively, these files can be created via a comlocal area. Then we averaged these samples to puter-aided design system. determine the local mean about the point in T h e overall CAD process is as follows. First, question. Table 1 summarizes the results. the floor plan must find its way into the CAD For these buildings the average error was package. This is done by scanning a floor plan never more than 3.1 dB, and the standard devia- drawing or obtaining an existing electronic vertion of the error was at-wost 5.3 dB. sion in a format such as Drawing Interchange Format (DXF), a standard ASCII file that represents drawing entities as vectors. If only a paAcquiring databases for buildings per drawing exists, the floor plan must be T h e radio-frequency propagation model re- scanned and saved to a raster file (for example, quires a digital building database to allow it to TIFF or PCX). Commercial software can then compute the possible ray paths from a transmit- be used to convert the raster file into a vector ter to a receiver. T h e database gives the loca- format or display the raster image directly in tions and compositions of walls, floors, and the CAD environment. other obstructions to radio waves, which are With the drawing displayed on the CAD represented as rectangular planes. Each plane is screen, t h e relevant building features a r e
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extracted from the original drawing, which usually contains much detail irrelevant to WISE. Using the CAD layering capabilities, the original drawing and features identified subsequently are kept on different layers. Also, walls with different constructions are kept in separate layers. Once the 2D drawing is complete, each layer is independently extruded in the third dimension to give i t height. Adding a ceiling and floor completes the 3D drawing. The resulting CAD drawing can now be filtered through a conversion program that extracts the relevant building coordinate data and ensures that these walls are valid for WISE. A valid wall must be rectangular, it must be horizontal or vertical, and it must not be a repeat of or enclosed by another wall. The output is the finished building database for the WISE propagation model. These techniques have been used to create databases for more than a dozen buildings, ranging from one floor of Bell Labs at Crawford Hill to the New York Stock Exchange to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The starting point for these buildings covered the entire range from hand-dr'awn sketches, through paper blueprints, up to CAD data files. Figure 2 shows a perspective view of the AT&T facility at Middletown, New Jersey, one of our

test cases, modeled with 1,360 walls. For comparison, the NYSE has 1,507 walls. As a very rough guess, a trained person could probably enter information for one floor of a building like Ahddletown in 4 to 6 hours.

Computational geometry
The principal challenge in predicting coverage is to cope with the potentially enormous combinatorial complexity of ray tracing. Each time a radio ray intersects a wall, it splits into a reflected ray and a transmitted ray. This is an exponential process. One simplification is to bound the maximum number r of reflections considered. A path from a base station to a particular site can then be specified by a sequence of up to r reflecting walls (with transmitting walls left implicit). With n walls in the building and s sites at which to sample coverage, the total number of potential paths is proportional to mr. In realistic buildings, n is a few hundred to a few thousand, s is a few thousand, and r must be at least 2 for accurate prediction, with 3 or 4 more desirable. Two techniques from computational geometry3 accelerate the ray tracing. First, suppose that a specific site and sequence of r reflecting walls are known. Then it is easy to compute a path consisting of r + 1 line segments in three dimensions from transmitter to site. However, the walls intersected along the path must be determined to compute transmission loss coefficients. We could in principle examine every wall in the building to see if it intersects the path, but this would take time proportional to nr. This time can be reduced by an appropriate spatial data structure. A suitable data structure is obtained using the observation that the number of distinct horizontal cross sections of a building is small. Typically there is one cross section for the floor, one for the space between floor and ceiling, and one for the ceiling (or if there is a false ceiling, one for it and one for the space between false and true ceilings). Each cross section is twodimensional and can be represented as a plane graph. The spatial data structure is an automatically computed triangulation of the graph, that is, the original graph plus dummy line segments so that each bounded region is a triangle. Triangulation simplifies programming. Triangles are the simplest figures with which to divide a 2D object formed of straight lines, which is the case for all our buildings.To trace a path in three dimensions, it suffices to split it into subpaths lying within a single horizontal cross
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Figure 2. Perspectiveview of one floor of the AT&T building, Middletown, N.J.(about 200 meters in each direction). 62

section, and then within each cross section trace the path projected into two dimensions. It is easy to do 2D path tracing in time proportional to the number of intersected triangle line segments. On average, only about half the intersected line segments are added dummy line segments; the other half correspond to true wall intersections. Hence the total time for 3D path tracing is approximately proportional to the actual number of walls intersected. A second technique can reduce the number of wall sequences to be considered. Not every sequence of reflecting walls and sites determines a valid 3D path. Consider the single wall W i n Figure 3 . T h e portion of 3D space that the transmitter T can illuminate by reflection off wall Wis a truncated cone. The apex of the cone is the reflection R of the transmitter across the plane of W. The cone is bounded by four planes that extend from R through the four edges of the wall W (which strictly speahng makes it an oblique four-faced pyramid, not a circular cone). The cone is truncated by deleting the portion of it from the apex R to the plane W. Clearly, only sites within the truncated cone need to be considered for illumination by a one-reflection path off wall W. More generally, only walls that intersect the truncated cone need to be considered. for two-reflection paths that start with wall W; such two-reflection paths illuminate similarly defined truncated cones in 3D. The triangulation data structure can be used to compute all walls that lie within a truncated cone in time roughly proportional to the number of such walls. Similarly, a variant data structure permits computing of all sites that lie within a truncated cone. The net effect is to vastly reduce the number of considered paths. However, this number still grows exponentially, though with a base much smaller than n. The two techniques produce a dramatic improvement in runtime. A two-reflection coverage map of Crawford Hill (n = SO) reduced runtime from 15 minutes t o 45 seconds; a two-reflection coverage map of the NYSE (n = 1,500) reduced an estimated runtime of 10 hours to 120 seconds. (These times were measured on an SGI system with a 40-MHz R3000 processor.) T h e predictor program is currently about 6,000 lines of C++.

yp'a
../
. . , ...., .'.... , ...,.. ... , .,... . ..
I

'%

Figure 3. Computational geometry simplifies ray tracing in several ways. Only locations within a truncated cone (shaded) are illuminated by a radio signal bounced off wall W.

applied t o analyze and enhance potential designs by automatically calculating the "best" values for specified system parameters. Mathematically, the (unconstrained) optimization problem is to maximize the objective function f@) of the real variables pl, p 2 , ..., Pd. In the wireless-placement problem, the variables are the base-station locations-three values (x, y, and z ) for each base station-so optimizing the location of two base stations involves six variables. The function frepresents the percentage of the building covered above a specified power threshold, and depends on the building data and properties of the wireless system (frequency, power, and so on), which are entered through the user interface described later. Assuming a fixed grid of possible locations for portable units and a threshold power level, the coverage f for a given set of base-station locations is defined as the ratio of the number of grid points with received power above the threshold to the total number of grid points. Unfortunately, coverage is not a smooth or even differentiable function of the base-station locations. The received power a t a single point may exhibit discontinuities because a tiny change in base-station location-for example, a move around a c o r n e r d a n cause an entirely different pattern of reflected and transmitted rays. For most buildings of practical interest, there will be many such points of discontinuity, distributed unpredictably around the building. In addition, our definition of coverage is inherently L L n ~ i ~ y , " that is, extremely limited in accuracy, sincefcan assume only a small number of values, because there are only a limited number of grid points (typically a few thousand). Because f is both nondifferentiable and noisy, standard powerful optimization techniques like Optimization Newton-based and quasi-Newton methods4 The computation just described can be used to cannot be applied effectively. The methods of determine coverage at any point quickly. Nu- choice (in fact, the only known general methods merical optimization techniques can then be suitable for such a problem) are usually called
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direct search methods. Numerous direct search methods were devised during the early 196Os, mostly based on heuristics derived from intuition about good moves in two or three dimensions; such strategies are sometimes highly misleading in spaces of larger dimension. Even without formal convergence proofs, the methods performed well and hence remained popular for 30 years. Quite recently, several researchers in optimization have begun to reexamine these methods, and rigorous convergence results have been obtained for the class of multidirectional search method^.^ By far the most popular direct search method is the so-called simplex method published in 1965 by John A. Nelder and Roger Mead6 (not to be confused with the better-known simplex method for linear programming). The original Nelder-Mead method constructs a simplex in d-dimensional space. (A simplex in d-dimensional space is a polyhedron with d + 1 vertices. For example, a simplex in two dimensions is a triangle; a simplex in three dimensions is a tetrahedron.) At each iteration, the method evaluatesf at one or more trial points whose location depends on the relative values of the function at the vertices and at earlier trial points. The purpose of each iteration is to create a new simplex in which the previous worst vertex (that is, the vertex with the smallest value off) has been replaced. The simplex is altered by reflection, expansion, or contraction, depending on whether f i s improving. Although usually quite efficient, the original Nelder-Mead method can suffer from numerical difficulties when, for example, the simplex has become highly elongated. Our optimization technique is an adaptation of the Nelder-Mead method tailored to the wireless problem. Direct search methods typically contain several coefficients (such as the expansion factor in Nelder-Mead) that control the logic at each step of the algorithm. Certain default values for these coefficients are regarded as standard, and appear in off-the-shelf direct search codes (for example, in Numerical Recipes7). However, it is well known that a careful choice of problem-specific coefficients can noticeably improve efficiency, in the sense that fewer function evaluations are needed for convergence to the solution. Our implementation of the modified Nelder-Mead method includes nonstandard values for these coefficients, derived from extensive numerical testing with the wireless problem. Another delicate computational issue affecting the efficiency of a direct search method is the specification of convergence criteria. Virgnia Torczon discusses in detail the impossibil64

ity of developing general-purpose convergence tests for direct search methods.s Ensuring that the convergence criteria are not too strict is especially important in the wireless problem because of the expense of calculatingf, the unavoidable approximations made in modeling, and the inherent noise in the function. For&nately, a substantial level of engineering and physical knowledge about the wireless problem is available that allows us to define appropriate termination tests. In a large number of runs on a variety of buildings with up to 1,500 walls, the direct search algorithm consistently converges to an acceptable local solution within a reasonable number of iterations. The number of iterations depends approximately linearly on the problem dimension. For one base station (three variables), convergence usually occurs within IS iterations, requiring about 20 to 25 function evaluations, where each function evaluation involves calculating a complete threshold coverage map as in Figure 4. An interesting and initially unexpected conclusion from our earliest computations was that the coverage function has a very large number of local maxima within all buildings tried. These multiple optima arise from the (in retrospect) unsurprising property that, for any location in the building, there is likely to be a nearby best point for coverage. Despite the existence of many local optima, there are three reasons that the wireless problem is not a standard global optimization problem in which we necessarily want to find the largest local maximum off: First, there are typically several base-station locations within a given building that produce the same best coverage, so that the global optimum is not unique. Second, the coverage model is only approximate, so there is no point to making a distinction between coverages of (say) 99.2 and 99.3 percent. Third, in the practical settings where WISE will be used, the best base-station placement is likely to be influenced by factors other than coverage. Some of these could be included in the model as constraints (for example, avoiding certain parts of the building, or requiring that the base stations be placed at the ceiling), but other factors (such as ease of installation and maintenance) would be difficult to model. It thus seems likely that an effective role for optimization within WISE is to provide a selection of options for favorable base-station locations. The optimization program is about 600 lines of c++.
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User interface
The user interface controls a system of programs for predicting and optimizing indoor wireless coverage. It displays plan, elevation, and perspective views of a building and shows in color the power received at each location for a given basestation site. T h e picture may be scaled and panned over; parameters may be set interactively. Figure 4 shows the plan view of one floor of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston as it appears through this interface, with a base station placed at the center of the circular area near the bottom left. This building has 3 13 walls. As you can see in Figure 4, there are menu buttons across the top of the display for buildings, base locations, predictors, parameters, displays, and help. Each of these buttons raises a submenu of further choices. For example, the Buildings menu offers these choices (along with a few others): Open wall file-choose a building from a fileselection dialog box Elevation vim-toggle elevation view Perspective view-create perspective view Rulers-toggle visibility of horizontal and vertical rulers for measuring Measure path-measure a path in a building Meters-toggle units between meters and feet Edit walls-add, delete, or modify walls and wall types Similarly, the Base locs menu includes these choices: Open data file-display previously computed data using a file-selection dialog box Add a base-add a new base (transmitter) and position it as desired Add a portable-add a new portable (receiver) Delete a baselportable-remove a base o r portable by mouse Edit a base/portable-edit coordinates and antenna parameters by text input rather than mouse Save power and rays-save current coverage information in a file Clear power and rays-clean up display The Predictors menu offers choices of Ray trace-trace all rays between bases and portables Predict received power-compute coverage and display a coverage map Optimize-run optimizer on current base location(s) Figure 4 showed the result of choosing the Predict received power item. Figure 5 shows
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the result of a ray trace with a portable located near the upper-right corner; it shows all the one-bounce rays from base to portable that exceed a threshold. The color of a ray encodes its intensity. It is interesting to note, comparing Figures 4 and 5 , how rays that bounce off the tiny angled wall at upper left create a path of somewhat better signal strength in the poorly covered upper-right area. Figure 6 shows the result of running an optimization with the base originally at the location shown in Figures 4 and 5 . This run took 6 minutes, and with 2 1 iterations managed to improve the coverage from 76.82 percent to 84.77 percent. W e have included the elevation view along with the plan view to make it clear that the base moves in three dimensions. The yellow circles are intermediate positions at which an improvement was obtained; the blue circle is the final location. The Parameters menu provides a variety of submenus for setting parameters of the predictors, radio, grid spacing, optimization, and color map. It also provides for saving and restoring current parameter settings and base locations, and for restoring all parameters to their default state. Figure 7 shows the predictor and radio parameter submenus to illustrate the general style. The Displays menu provides a variety of submenus:

76.82% covered at -80 dElm

Figure 4. The WISE interface: map of signal power for the Hynes Convention Center, Boston, with one base station at lower left. Areas below the -80 dBm threshold are shown in gray.

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Receivedpmw-the normal display of coverage RMS delay-delay coverage, with a different color scale Power CDF-umulative distribution of power RMS delay CDF-cumulative distribution of delay Strongest base-shows which base provides the strongest signal at each location Clone display-brings up a copy of a window, for saving and editing pictures

Figure 8 shows RMS delay, regular power coverage, and a display of strongest base, for AT&Ts Crawford IIill building. Note that the regions of strongest signal for any specific base are not contiguous.

User interface implementation

The user interface proper has two parts. T h e purely graphical and display components are written in TcVTk, a public-domain system developed at U C Berkeley by John Ousterhout.8 Tcl is a simple interpreted language at about the level of Awk or Per1 or the C shell; it is meant for writing scripts of modest complexity, and for combining with C code into larger systems. T k is an example of such C code, a library of widgets for the X Window System that mimics the Motif widget set in functionality and appearance. The widgets include menu buttons, sliders, scales, scrollbars, and a general canvas widget for graphical operations; canvases are used for displaying the building plan and elevation views. The second half of the interface is a C++program that is controlled by the T k part. T h e C++program is responsible for reading and writing files, and for any substantial amount of arithmetic. The division into two pieces is not mandatory, but has proven to be more efficient than other alternatives. In particular, although T k widgets are generally very efficient (they are coded in C), some computations are slow. For example, arithmetic is not fast, since Tcl converts all numbers from and to strings. Tcl and T k provide a remarkably flexible and effective tool for building interfaces. W e have been able to perform many experiments with the look and feel of the interface in response to suggestions and criticisms by users. It appears that developing interfaces with Tcl/Tk is at least an order of magnitude faster than with code written in C or C++, even with good libraries and other aids. T h e code is also relatively compact: for months the interface had less than 500 lines of Tcl and about 250 lines of Awk. The current version has 2,500 lines of Tcl and 1,200 lines of C++.There is also a separate program of about 1,3 50 lines of C++ for the perspective view.

Figure 5. Ray tracing between the base station and a portable receiver location (magenta dot). Brighter rays are stronger.

Figure 6. Optimizing the base location in three dimensions improved coverage from about 77 to about 85 percent.

ISE is a sophisticated and powerful tool for design and analysis of wireless communication systems. W e believe that tools like this will beconie indispensable for engineering highIEEE COMPUTATIONAL & ENGINEERING SCIENCE

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Putting WISE on a PC
Many potential users of WISE use PCs exclusively, so we have undertaken an implementation of the WISE system for PCs running Microsoft Windows. This implementation is incomplete and not robust; it is not straightforwardto move Tcl/Tk and X programs from Unix to Windows. The C++ programs themselves are easily ported: almost nothing C needs to be changed except for an occasional construct that P C++ compilers can't cope with. Parts of the user interface have been rewritten in Visual Basic. This is quite convenient for some aspects of the task, and yields a polished-looking interface, but Visual Basic gives the user little help with graphics or geometrical calculations. We have also not completed some of the mouse-based interactions for moving base stations and portables. Our PC prototype thus shows the potential, but is not yet a production system.

Figure 7. Submenus for predictor and radio parameters.

capacity systems in complex environments. Although we have worked primarily on indoor applications, an immediate extension of the techniques in WISE is to outdoor wireless, where the propagation model needs to include diffraction (among other effects), and the geometric model must allow terrain changes as well as buildings of different heights and shapes. We have learned several lessons from our experience with the WISE project. Some of these we already knew, or should have known, but we learned them again. The main ones follow. The creation of WISE has been an almostideal example of a multidisciplinary project. The work and the programs divide cleanly into four pieces of approximately equal importance-radio, computational geometry, optimization, and user interface. Off-the-shelf algorithms or software in each of these areas would have been dismally inadequate-the obvious approaches run too slowly-so expertise in the component fields was an absolute prerequisite. But WISE is not simply a collection of four specialized parts; some of the most interesting technical issues arose because the parts have to work smoothly together. It is a well-worn cliche to say that building a real tool requires tallung to real users. Nonethe-

impossible without the common ground provided by the user interface. The interface was essential to the success of the project. W e also learned how rich and complicated radio propagation can be. There were numerous examples of behaviors where a t first we assumed there was a bug (some location was covered, its neighbor was not, etc.), but there was usually a good explanation in terms of obstacle positions. Radio engineers are often surprised about propagation; the tool now helps explain unexpected results. Although geometric calculations in three dimensions are ubiquitous in physical problems,

easily with the underlymg programs and visualizing the results they produced would have been
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Figure 8. The Clone Display feature allows saving and editing of pictures. Top to bottom: plots of R M S delay, coverage, and strongest base.

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David M. Gay received his PhD in the benefits from the computational geometry computer science from Cornell Unitechniques in WISE (such as triangulation) apversity in 1975, and has been a mempear to be known only to a small community. ber of technical staff in the Computing Science Research Center at AT&T Our experience with WISE suggests that enorBell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., mous gains in speed can result from application since 1981. His research interests inof computational geometry. T h e techniques clude numerical analysis, optimization, and scientific computing. H e is a coauemployed are perhaps standard, but successful thor of the book integration into a reliable, efficient, and flexible Languagefor Mathmatical Programming.AMPL, A Modeling system is not at all straightforward. Optimization as a generic technique is used in a wide range of contexts, but the best choice of Brian W. Kernighan received his PhD in electrical engineering from method depends heavily on available informaPrinceton University in 1969, and has tion, problem size, and required accuracy. Exbeen in the Computing Science Reperience with our variant of the Nelder-Mead search Center a t AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., since then. method suggests that it can be remarkably efHis current research interests include fective in optimizing functions that are unpreapplication-oriented languages and dictably non-smooth. user interfaces. He is the coauthor of

several books, including The C Programming Langu,age and The Unix Programming Environment. He is a member of IEEE.

Acknowledgments
W e are grateful to our colleagues Steve Cosmas, Phil DiPiazza, T o m Duff, Vinko Erceg, Larry Greenstein, Rich Leung, Jonathan Ling, Don Moore, Demetri Prountzos, Chris Read, Bob Roman, Tony Rustako, Roya Shafiei, and Ken Watson for much help and support during the development of WISE. Orlando Landron received his BS and MS in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia. He is now in the Wireless Communications Systems Engineering Group a t AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J. His work has primarily involved the characterization and modeling of radio-wave propagation for personal communication systems design. Landron is a member of IEEE.

References
1. R.A. Valenzuela, A Ray Tracing Approach to Predicting Indoor Wireless Transmission, Proc. 1993 IEEE 43rd Vehicular Technolow Conf, IEEE Press, Piscatawav. ,, N.J., 1993, pp. 214-218u: 2. S. Ramo, J.R. Whinnery, and T . Van Duzer, Fields and Waves in Communications Electronics,2nd ed., John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984.

3. F.P. Preparata and M.I. Shamos, Computational Geometry, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1985. 4. P.E. Gill, W. Murray, and M.H. Wright, Practical Optimization, Academic Press, San Diego, Calif., 1981. 5. V. Torczon, On the Convergence of the Multidirectional Search Algorithm, S U M 3 . on Optimization,Vol. 1, 1991, pp. 123-145. 6. J.A. Nelder and R. Mead, A Simplex Method for Function Minimization, Computer3., Vol. 7, 1965, pp. 308-3 13. 7. W.H. Press et al., Numerical Recipes in C, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1988. 8. J.K. Ousterhout, Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1994.

Reinaldo A. Valenzuela received the BSc(E Eng) degree from the University of Chile, and the DIC and PhD from Imperial College, London. His doctoral work introduced novel digital filter architectures with applications in transmultiplexer design. In 1988-89 he was manager of voice research a t Motorola Codex. H e is now with the Communication Systems Research Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Crawford Hill, N.J., where he does research on wireless systems.

Steven J. Fortune is a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. H e received his PhD from Cornell University in computer science in 1979 and has been a t Bell Labs since 1983. His research area is geometric algorithms.

Margaret H. Wright received her BS in mathematics and her MS and PhD in computer science from Stanford. She is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff a t AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J. Wright has served on committees for the Ofice of Naval Research. NSF. and the Department of Energy, is an editor of several lournals, and IS this magazines area editor for optimization. She is currently president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Readers may reach the authors in care of Wright or Kernighan a t AT&T Bell Laboratories, Rm. 2C-462, 600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636, e-mail mhw@research.att.com or bwk@research.att.com. IEEE COMPUTATIONAL & ENGINEERING SCIENCE

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