A User Centric Blockage Model for Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel geometric cascade blockage model for wireless networks that accounts for obstacle geometry and blockage correlation, enabling analysis of coverage, beamforming, and interference in dense and sparse environments.

Contribution

It presents a new radial cascade model based on obstacle geometry, with efficient solutions for coverage and beamforming analysis considering blockage correlation.

Findings

Beam selection is highly effective for multi-beam terminals.

Blockage correlation can be exploited to improve beam sweeping efficiency.

The model accurately predicts coverage probability in various blockage scenarios.

Abstract

This paper proposes a cascade blockage model for analyzing the vision that a user has of a wireless network. This model, inspired by the classical multiplicative cascade models, has a radial structure meant to analyze blockages seen by the receiver at the origin in different angular sectors. The main novelty is that it is based on the geometry of obstacles and takes the joint blockage phenomenon into account. We show on a couple of simple instances that the Laplace transforms of total interference satisfies a functional equation that can be solved efficiently by an iterative scheme. This is used to analyze the coverage probability of the receiver and the effect of blockage correlation and penetration loss in both dense and sparse blockage environments. Furthermore, this model is used to investigate the effect of blockage correlation on user beamforming techniques. Another functional equation and its associated iterative algorithm are proposed to derive the coverage performance of the best beam selection in this context. In addition, the conditional coverage probability is also derived to evaluate the effect of beam switching. The results not only show that beam selection is quite efficient for multi-beam terminals, but also show how the correlation brought by blockages can be leveraged to accelerate beam sweeping and pairing.