Effect of atmospheric absorption on millimetre wave frequencies for 5G cellular networks

Abstract

Wireless Communication technologies are growing rapidly to meet increasing demands of users. This creates overhead in existing wireless systems. This manifests in the continuous development of wireless systems to keep pace with the increasing capacity demand. Increase in the number of users increases congestion in cellular bands, hence Extremely High Frequency (EHF) bands such as mmWave are attracting growing attention for use in cellular networks. Millimeter Wave (mmWave) bands can support multi-Gigabit rates for large bandwidth applications in Next generation networks. These bands have certain limitations like, these cannot travel long distances and cannot penetrate buildings and other objects. These limitations can be advantageously exploited to provide more secure communication and permit high-frequency reuse. This will facilitate efficient spectrum utilization and support design of densely packed networks. This paper reviews the propagation characteristics of mmWaves and effect of external factors like atmospheric gases, rain, foliage, and diffraction. Our main focus will be to study the effect of these factors on the propagation of mmWave frequencies to be used for 5G cellular networks. We evaluate the losses due to atmospheric gases, rain and foliage at 28, 30 and 60 GHz frequencies which are supposed to be used in 5G cellular networks.