: In the fourth generation wireless networks, it is believed that wireless LANs (WLANs) will interwork with cellular systems to provide fast speed data services. The integration of WLANs and cellular systems calls for a careful design of handover decisions. In WLANs, the received signal strength (RSS) is used for handover decision, thus a thorough understanding of the characteristics of the RSS of beacons is important in the WLAN handover design. In this paper, measurements of the RSS of WLAN beacons in an indoor environment are presented, and based on theoretical analysis, Gamma random variables (RVs) are used to model the RSS variation from the average power, which fits the measurement data well. Correlation is observed in the variation, and new algorithms have been designed to generate correlated Gamma RVs.