Multiple ray received power modelling for mmWave indoor and outdoor scenarios

Abstract

Millimetre-wave (mmWave) frequency bands are expected to be used for future fifth generation networks due to the availability of a large unused spectrum. However, the attenuation at mmWave frequencies is high. To resolve this issue, the utilisation of high gain antennas and beamforming mechanisms are widely investigated in the literature. In this work, the authors considered mmWave end-to-end propagation modelled by individual ray sources and explored the effects of the number of rays in the model and radiation patterns of the deployed antennas on the received power. It is shown that taking the dominant two rays is sufficient to model the channel for outdoor open areas as opposed to the indoor corridor which needs five dominant rays to have a good fit for the measurement and simulation results. It is observed that the radiation pattern of the antenna affects the slope of the path loss. Multi-path components increase the received power, thus, for indoor corridor scenarios, path loss according to the link distance is smaller for lower gain antennas due to increased reception of reflected components. For an outdoor open area, the slope of the path loss is found to be very close to that of the free space.