A coaxial cable having a slotted or perforated outer conductor can be used
as a base-station antenna for indoor wireless systems. This paper explores
the use of ray-tracing software to predict the radio coverage that can be a
chieved by a leaky coax in a building with a given wall geometry. For eithe
r coupled-mode or radiating-mode cable, a heuristic model that represents t
he cable as a sequence of finite segments, each of which radiates diffusely
with a radiation pattern given by Lambert's cosine law, is found to work w
ell. However, the coupling-loss parameter, which defines the effective powe
r radiated by each element, appears to depend significantly on whether the
cable is laid in a rich scattering environment or a barren one.