Abstract
Ray tracing- (RT-) assisted beamforming, where beams are directly steered to dominant paths tracked by ray tracing simulations, is a promising beamforming strategy, since it avoids the time-consuming exhaustive beam searching adopted in conventional beam steering strategies. The performance of RT-assisted beamforming depends directly on how accurate the spatial profiles of the radio environment can be predicted by the RT simulation. In this paper, we investigate how ray tracing-assisted beamforming performs in both poorly furnished and richly furnished indoor environments. Single-user beamforming performance was investigated using both single beam and multiple beams, with two different power allocation schemes applied to multibeamforming. Channel measurements were performed at 28–30 GHz using a vector network analyzer equipped with a biconical antenna as the transmit antenna and a rotated horn antenna as the receive antenna. 3D ray tracing simulations were carried out in the same replicated propagation environments. Based on measurement and ray tracing simulation data, it is shown that RT-assisted beamforming performs well both for single and multibeamforming in these two representative indoor propagation environments.
Highlights
Utilization of millimeter-wave frequencies for 5G standards has gained considerable interest within the wireless industry in recent years [1, 2]
The ray trajectories from ray tracing (RT) simulation for Tx position 4 are shown in Figure 10, with dominant rays numbered in Figures 9 and 10
Extensive channel sounding measurements and ray tracing simulations in various locations in two widely different indoor scenarios were performed at 28–30 GHz, and the channel profiles were analyzed and compared
Summary
Utilization of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies for 5G standards has gained considerable interest within the wireless industry in recent years [1, 2]. Extensive channel sounding in various propagation scenarios at many potential mm-wave frequency bands is time-consuming, though extensive efforts are ongoing. RT simulations were conducted in many studies to assess coverage, large-scale parameters, and multipath effects at mm-wave bands in various propagation environments [8]. A preliminary overview of the 5G channel propagation phenomena and channel models for bands up International Journal of Antennas and Propagation to 100 GHz was reported in [8], where the results were derived based on extensive channel sounding measurements and RT simulations when measurement results were not available. In [13, 14], a RT tool including diffuse scattering is calibrated and used to compare RT to measurements in a furnished but open indoor environment. The authors utilize RT to identify clusters for different Tx-Rx polarization and measurements to tune the RT scattering parameters
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