Line of Sight Probability in Millimetre Wave Systems

Abstract

Understanding how people interact with, carry and hold user equipment (UE) will be critical for the successful design and operation of future wireless networks. This is especially pertinent for cellular communications operating at millimetre-wave frequencies (e.g. 60 GHz), where blocking and shadowing of the UE by the user's body and other people in the environment can cause the link to go into outage and severely disrupt the transmission of data.Therefore future wireless network designers will require detailed models of the movement of people and UE usage behaviour within their intended area of coverage. In particular for small cell network architectures, the orientation of the user, UE and the probability of encountering an obstruction (e.g. another person) in the immediate surroundings. For larger-scale networks, the user's distance from the base station and their relative orientation may also be important. Using the results obtained from various field measurements, novel probability models which characterise the likelihood of being in line of sight (LOS), quasi-LOS (QLOS) or non-LOS (NLOS) will be developed.In order to validate in practice the theoretical results obtained in this Project, an in loco interaction with the Center for Wireless Innovation, Queen's University Belfast, one of the UK's largest research centers, focused on the physical layer of wireless communications systems. In fact, this interaction has taken place throughout the candidate's PhD and is continuing throughout his postdoctoral research, in which several successful joint works have been developed.