60 GHz Blockage Study Using Phased Arrays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel phased array measurement system to study mmWave channel dynamics, focusing on human blockage effects and path separation, providing insights for robust beamforming in dynamic environments.

Contribution

It presents a new measurement system using phased arrays for rapid mmWave channel measurements and develops a low-rank tensor model to analyze multi-path blockage dynamics.

Findings

Human blockage effects vary across multiple paths.

Rapid measurement captures dynamic channel changes.

Tensor modeling separates path statistics effectively.

Abstract

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies offer the potential for enormous capacity wireless links. However, designing robust communication systems at these frequencies requires that we understand the channel dynamics over both time and space: mmWave signals are extremely vulnerable to blocking and the channel can thus rapidly appear and disappear with small movement of obstacles and reflectors. In rich scattering environments, different paths may experience different blocking trajectories and understanding these multi-path blocking dynamics is essential for developing and assessing beamforming and beam-tracking algorithms. This paper presents the design and experimental results of a novel measurement system which uses phased arrays to perform mmWave dynamic channel measurements. Specifically, human blockage and its effects across multiple paths are investigated with only several microseconds between successive measurements. From these measurements we develop a modeling technique which uses low-rank tensor factorization to separate the available paths so that their joint statistics can be understood.