Characterizing Multipath Radio Environments for 5G Wireless Systems and Beyond

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Volume Title

School of Electrical Engineering | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2023-09-29

Date

2023

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

144 + app. 184

Series

Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL THESES, 136/2023

Abstract

The envelope of performance in Fifth generation (5G) technology will be much greater than what we see in legacy technologies, featuring low latency, ultra-high data rates, massive connectivity, and increased security. 5G wireless systems operating in centimeter (cm) and millimeter (mm) wave parts of the frequency spectrum must deal with all sorts of radio wave propagation conditions imposed by a radio channel. This entails thoroughly characterizing radio channels across the desired frequency range for efficient system design and performance. The primary focus of this thesis is (1) to model the interaction of radio waves with material objects in radio environments, and (2) to characterize multipath radio channels at cmWave and mmWave frequencies. The key contributions of the thesis are summarized as follows. First, a comprehensive evaluation of transmission and reflection losses for material objects in built environments is carried out at the 70 GHz frequency band. The results demonstrate that energy-efficient building windows, laminated plywood, and plasterboard are good reflectors of mmWave signals, while humans and some energy-efficient windows attenuate mmWave signals as high as 40 dB. Second, a novel method is proposed for the on-site estimation of the permittivity of built-in materials using the point cloud geometrical database and limited channel measurements of a given radio environment. The estimated material permittivities of a large indoor office are visualized through a colored three-dimensional (3D) point cloud map of the environment. Third, human blockage losses are measured through anechoic chamber measurements for 15 human subjects with different weights and sizes at 15, 28, and 60 GHz frequency bands. Moreover, a novel double-truncated multiple knife-edge (DTKME) model is proposed that reasonably predicts the measured human blockage loss for different body orientations and illuminating antenna heights. Fourth, the feasibility of applying full-wave numerical techniques for coverage predictions is determined by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations for the coverage analysis inside a small indoor office. It is transpired that the full-wave methods are computationally expensive, and a trade-off exists between the accuracy and complexity of these simulations. Finally, multipath characterization of cmWave and mmWave radio channels is performed for indoor and outdoor radio environments in terms of their power, delay, and angular domain behavior. The fluctuations in the signal envelope of mmWave channels are more significant than their cmWave counterparts. The mmWave channels exhibit less delay dispersion compared to cmWave radio channels. The spatial spread of multipath is similar in line-of-sight (LOS) conditions across cmWave and mmWave radio channels, while in non-LOS (NLOS) propagation conditions, the cmWave radio channels offer more spatial spread of multipath than mmWave radio channels.

Description

Supervising professor

Viikari, Ville, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, Finland; Haneda, Katsuyuki, Assoc. Prof., Aalto University, Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, Finland

Thesis advisor

Wagen, Jean-Frederic, Assoc. Prof., HEIA-FR, Switzerland

Keywords

centimeter wave, millimeter wave, human blockage, point cloud, permittivity map, channel modeling

Other note

Parts

  • [Publication 1]: U. T. Virk, K. Haneda, V-M. Kolmonen, P. Vainikainen, and Y. Kaipainen. Characterization of vehicle penetration loss at wireless communication frequencies. In Proc. 8th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP’14), The Hague, Netherlands, April 2014.
    DOI: 10.1109/EuCAP.2014.6901733 View at publisher
  • [Publication 2]: U. T. Virk, J-F. Wagen, and K. Haneda. Simulating specular reflections for point cloud geometrical database of the environment. In Proc. Loughborough Antennas and Propagation Conference (LAPC’15), Loughborough, UK, November 2015
  • [Publication 3]: U. T. Virk, K. Haneda, and J. Putkonen. Estimating reflection and transmission losses for link-obstructing objects at 70 GHz for 5G wireless backhauling. In Proc. Loughborough Antennas and Propagation Conference (LAPC’18), Loughborough, UK, November 2018.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201904022447
    DOI: 10.1049/cp.2018.1423 View at publisher
  • DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2018.2829798 View at publisher
  • [Publication 5]: U. T. Virk and K. Haneda. Modeling human blockage at 5G millimeterwave frequencies. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 2256–2266, March 2020.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202001021163
    DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2019.2948499 View at publisher
  • [Publication 6]: U. T. Virk, K. Haneda, V-M. Kolmonen, J-F.Wagen, and P. Vainikainen. Full-wave characterization of indoor office environment for accurate coverage analysis. In Proc. International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications (ICEAA’13), Turin, Italy, September.
    DOI: 10.1109/ICEAA.2013.6632434 View at publisher
  • [Publication 7]: U. T. Virk, S. L. H. Nguyen, and K. Haneda. Multi-frequency power angular spectrum comparison for an indoor environment. In Proc. 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP’17), Paris, France, April 2017.
    DOI: 10.23919/EuCAP.2017.7928498 View at publisher
  • [Publication 8]: S. Sangadoyin, U. T. Virk, D. Burghal, K. Haneda, and A-F. Molisch. Joint characterization of mm-wave and cm-wave device-to-device fading channels. In Proc. Military Communications Conference (MILCOMM’ 18), Los Angeles, USA, October 2018.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201904022425
    DOI: 10.1109/MILCOM.2018.8599827 View at publisher

Citation