System-Level Performance of mmWave Cellular Networks for Urban Micro Environments

TL;DR

This study evaluates the performance of mmWave cellular networks in urban micro environments, focusing on propagation loss and signal quality, and identifies suitable frequency bands for outdoor and indoor scenarios.

Contribution

It provides system-level simulation analysis of mmWave frequencies in urban micro settings, considering different power allocation schemes and their impact on signal quality.

Findings

Scaled transmit power results in minimal GM degradation for outdoor MSs.

High frequencies (60-100 GHz) significantly reduce GM performance for outdoor MSs.

Indoor MSs maintain good GM only at low frequencies (around 2 GHz).

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the propagation coupling loss (captures all sources of attenuation between serving cell and mobile station (MS)) and geometry metric (GM) (downlink average signal-to-interference plus noise ratio) performance of mmWave cellular networks for outdoor and indoor MSs, considering urban micro (UMi) environments. Based on these studies, we identify effective mmWave frequency bands for cellular communication. We consider 3GPP compliant system-level simulations with two power allocation schemes: 1) transmit power scaled with communication bandwidth, and 2) constant total transmit power. Simulation results show that with scaled transmit power allocation, GM performance degradation is small: 20% of MSs experience GM less than 0 dB at all mmWave frequencies considered, for outdoor MSs. With constant Tx power allocation, 20% of MSs experience GM less than 0 dB for frequencies up to 30 GHz. Furthermore, 35% (48%) of outdoor MSs experience GM performance less than 0 dB at 60 GHz (100 GHz). On the other hand, for indoor MSs, even with scaled Tx power allocation, favorable GM performance is observed only at low frequencies, i.e., 2 GHz.