Synthesizing Omnidirectional Antenna Patterns, Received Power and Path Loss from Directional Antennas for 5G Millimeter-Wave Communications

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to synthesize omnidirectional antenna patterns and received power from directional antenna measurements at millimeter-wave frequencies, enabling accurate path loss modeling for 5G systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel synthesis method that combines measurements from multiple antenna pointing angles to accurately derive omnidirectional patterns and received power.

Findings

Synthesized omnidirectional received power is independent of antenna beamwidth.

The method enhances measurement range using directional antennas.

Validation through theoretical analysis and millimeter-wave measurements.

Abstract

Omnidirectional path loss models are vital for radiosystem design in wireless communication systems, as they allow engineers to perform network simulations for systems with arbitrary antenna patterns. At millimeter-wave frequencies, channel measurements are frequently conducted using steerable highgain directional antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to make up for the significant increase in free space path loss at these frequencies compared to traditional cellular systems that operate at lower frequencies. The omnidirectional antenna pattern, and resulting omnidirectional received power must therefore be synthesized from many unique pointing angles, where the transmit and receive antennas are rotated over many different azimuth and elevation planes. In this paper, the equivalent omnidirectional antenna pattern and omnidirectional received power are synthesized by summing the received powers from all measured unique pointing angles obtained at antenna halfpower beamwidth step increments in the azimuth and elevation planes, and this method is validated by demonstrating that the synthesized omnidirectional received power and path loss are independent of antenna beamwidth, through theoretical analyses and millimeter-wave propagation measurements using antennas with different beamwidths. The method in this paper is shown to provide accurate results while enhancing the measurement range substantially through the use of directional antennas.