Analysis of Urban Millimeter Wave Microcellular Networks

Millimeter wave networks are sensitive to blockages due to densely distributed buildings in urban areas. This is critical for vehicle-to-infrastructure networks, which are cellular networks designed to support emerging vehicular applications. Most popular pathloss models use only the Euclidean distance between the transmitter and the receiver to characterize the channel, but in urban environments where severe blockages caused by buildings is often encountered, Euclidean distance does not provide enough information to characterize the pathloss. 

 

To better understand the channel in urban vehicular communication, WNCG graduate students Yuyang Wang and Kiran Venugopal, University of Southern California Professor Andreas F. Molisch and WNCG Professor Robert W. Heath Jr. propose a stochastic geometry approach to analyze the performance of blockage and coverage probability and the effects of line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) interferers. Motivated by measurement and ray tracing results in urban microcells, instead of characterizing the pathloss by Euclidean distance, they calculate pathloss by the weighted sum of segment length along the propagation path, and a certain corner loss at the intersections. Modeling the urban microcell network by a Manhattan Poisson line process, their results show significant differences between Hamming and previous Euclidean distance-based pathloss models. Based on the assumption that the receiver is associated with the base station with the smallest pathloss, the research team reveals the impacts of interference from the LOS and NLOS BSs, which shows that under this pathloss model the interference from a NLOS parallel street is negligible. 

 

This work will appear at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference in Fall 2016. 

 

This research was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation through the Data-Supported Transportation Operations and Planning (D-STOP) Tier 1 University Transportation Center, by the Texas Department of Transportation under Project 0-6877 entitled “Communications and Radar-Supported Transportation Operations and Planning (CAR-STOP)."