  Indoor wireless communication using Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) is becoming a
major need for the success of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud robotics in
both developed and developing countries. With different operating conditions,
interference, obstacles and type of building materials used, it is difficult to
predict the path loss components in an indoor environment, which are crucial
for the network design. It has been observed that the indoor path loss models
proposed for western countries cannot be directly used in Indian scenarios due
to variations in building materials utilized, floor plans, etc. In this paper,
we have proposed a non-deterministic statistical indoor path loss model- Tata
Indoor Path Loss Model (T-IPLM) which can be used for the 2.4 - 2.5 GHz,
Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) band. To propose and validate, we have
conducted several drive tests with different conditions such as busy office
premise with obstacles, open office premise, corridor, canteen, and
multi-storey office locations, etc. We have also compared T-IPLM with popular
path loss models such as ITU-R and Log-distance; T-IPLM matches closely with
the drive test results as compared to other models. We believe that T-IPLM
model can be used extensively to design accurate indoor communication networks
required for regular WiFi communications and deployment and operations of IoT
and cloud robotics.
