Impact of antenna radiation pattern variation on the performance of SPMA at 28 GHz

Abstract

The target of this paper is to analyze the impact of variation in antenna radiation pattern on the performance of Single Path Multiple Access (SPMA) in urban/dense-urban environment. For this study, an extended 3GPP antenna model, and 3D building data from an urban area of Helsinki city is used. The simulations are performed at 28 GHz frequency using “sAGA” a MATLAB based 3D ray tracing tool. The variables considered for the series of simulations are Front to Back Ratio (FBR), Side Lobe Level (SLL), and Half Power Beamwidth (HPBW) of an antenna in horizontal and vertical plane. Network performance is compared in terms of metrics like signal strength, SINR, and capacity. This paper also presents the spectral efficiency and power efficiency analysis. The performance of SPMA was found susceptible to the change in antenna radiation pattern, and the simulation results show a significant impact of radiation pattern on the capacity gain offered by SPMA. Interestingly, SPMA was found a fairly power efficient solution with respect to the traditional macro cellular network approach. However, the level of power efficiency heavily depends upon the antenna beamwidth and on other beam parameters.