Propagation Channel Characterization of 28 GHz and 36 GHz Millimeter-Waves for 5G Cellular Networks

Abstract

Recent advances in 5G wireless technologies calls for larger bandwidth, which motivates design engineers and researchers to explore a higher frequency spectrum than the existing one spectrum of below 6 GHz. Millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) is viewed as the most suitable spectrum to satisfy the constraints for 5G and beyond cellular systems. However, it is observed that enabling mm-Wave can bring several issues like path loss, fading, scattering, coverage inadequacy, penetration loss, and signal attenuation problems. Therefore, augmenting the propagation path is important to indicate the behavior of the wireless channel prior to its deployment in the real-world environment. For this reason, we aim to analyze the two most promising mm-Wave frequency bands; 28 GHz and 36 GHz. We have selected the most popular Close-In (CI) & Floating-Intercept (FI) propagation path loss models that helped us to design an urban microcell line of sight (LOS) scenario. Finally, the overall network performance has been investigated by evaluating average user throughput, average cell throughput, cell-edge user throughput, peak user throughput, and spectral capacity. Our results show that the CI model performs much better than the FI model due to its high accuracy, simplicity of implementation, robustness, and single-factor dependency.