Performance Analysis of Indoor mmWave Networks With Ceiling-Mounted Access Points

Abstract

The objective of the Enhanced Mobile Broadband use case in 5G networks is to deliver high capacity access to densely populated areas, like city centres, transportation hubs or convention centres. Millimetre-wave communications are the go-to technology to realise that objective, yet due to weak outdoor-to-indoor penetration, outdoor deployments will not suffice and dedicated indoor deployments will be necessary. In this article, we study dense deployments of millimetre-wave access points mounted on the ceiling, with directional antennas pointing downwards to illuminate selected spots on the ground. In this setup, the signal propagation is primarily limited by human body blockages. Therefore, we develop a body blockage model and derive an expression for the probability of blockage. Using the developed expressions and our simulation framework, we assess the impact of densification and body blockage on the achievable performance. We find that both coverage and area spectral efficiency curves exhibit non-trivial behaviour with respect to the access point density and that there is an optimal beamwidth-density configuration that only maximises either coverage or area spectral efficiency. Such optimal configuration changes depending on the body blockage probability, leading to a necessity for network designers to carefully consider their intended application and scenario.

Indoor Millimeter-Wave Systems: Design and Performance Evaluation

“…Furthermore, we assume that each transmission link experiences blockages independently of all other links. Numerical evaluations in [40] show that this independence assumption results in negligible differences to the blockage probability.…”

“…Most work to date on system-level evaluations for mmWave networking are focused on largescale outdoor areas, e.g., [32]- [34]. Indoor area mmWave network analysis has received much less attention, with some earlier works considering device-to-device applications [35], [36], and more recent works addressing hotspot deployments [37]- [40]. While building on the relevant literature, our work presented in this section goes beyond it in two important ways.…”

Performance Evaluation of Scheduling in 5G-mmWave Networks under Human Blockage

“…As depicted in Fig. 3, we consider a single ceiling-mounted AP that is positioned in the centre of the network area at a height of 2 m above the UE antennas and is equipped with a directive antenna facing downward having beamwidth 170 • and gain of 3.16 dBi [31]. The UEs are uniformly distributed in the AP coverage area (of radius ρ =15 m), are equipped with an omnidirectional receiver antenna and are all served from the same AP.…”

Performance of Priority-Based Traffic Coexistence Strategies in 5G mmWave Industrial Deployments

“…Thus, NR BSs need to support a mixture of eMBB and URLLC services at the same time. Mechanisms for supporting these services in isolation at mmWave NR BSs are currently the focus of ongoing studies, e.g., [5]- [7] for eMBB and [8]- [10] for URLLC. Specifically, in context of URLLC service, packet duplication allowing to provide high level of reliability for URLLC services is considered in [9].…”