Millimeter-Wave Human Blockage Model Enhancements for Directional Antennas and Multiple Blockers

Abstract

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has defined a blockage model as an add-on feature to the channel model used in its evaluations of the physical layer in the 0.5-100 GHz frequency range. This letter focuses on the human body blockage losses in the millimeter-wave band proposing: (i) a new criterion to place the diffraction points over the edges of the blockers that considers the precise position of the blocker with regard to the line-of-sight between the transmitter and the receiver, (ii) a specific criterion to determine which potential blockers, from a set of human bodies present in a certain scenario, should be considered effective blockers given the positions of a transmitter, a receiver, and those bodies, and (iii) a modification of the model to provide more accurate estimations in the case in which several blockers are closely located. The validity of our criteria and the accuracy improvement are confirmed by a set of measurements performed at 30 GHz with directional antennas and with multiple human blockers in different positions.