Broadband measurements and analysis of human blocking in a 60 GHz indoor radio channel

TL;DR

This paper investigates how human body blockage affects 60 GHz indoor wireless channels, quantifying attenuation and demonstrating beamforming's effectiveness in maintaining connectivity through reflections.

Contribution

It provides detailed measurements of human blockage effects at 60 GHz and shows how beamforming can mitigate these effects by utilizing reflected paths.

Findings

Human body causes 24-26 dB attenuation at 60 GHz

Beamforming exploits reflections to overcome blockage

Reflected paths can effectively replace direct links when blocked

Abstract

New millimeter-wave wireless communication systems can be strongly impacted by the blockage introduced by the human body. At 60 GHz, the coverage of these systems is relatively limited due to high propagation losses. Thus, beamforming allows to find a reflective path to replace the blocked one. In this work, the study focuses on the impact of a human blocker in a meeting room, to evaluate the blocking losses introduced by the human body at 60 GHz. The results obtained in terms of path loss and channel impulse response show that the attenuation by the human body is between 24 and 26 dB. Moreover, the results show that the use of beamforming allows to exploit the reflected paths to replace the direct link that can be blocked by the human body.