Preliminary 5G Suburban Micro (SMi) Channel Model for Different Foliage Conditions

One important deployment case for 5G will be as an alternative to fiber to the home. The result is that a significant number of 5G deployments will be in a suburban setting, referred to as the suburban micro (SMi) environment in this paper. This SMi environment will be characterized by access points (APs) located on lamp or utility poles at heights no greater than around 8 m and user equipment (UE) being located inside or outside of a home. The suburban setting is quite different from the urban micro (UMi) or urban macro (UMa) environments in that foliage will play a very significant role and buildings are dominated by one to two story homes instead of multi-story apartment and office buildings. Unfortunately existing channel models, particularly the new 3GPP channel model from 6 to 100 GHz, are designed for environments other than SMi. In this paper we propose a preliminary channel model for the SMi environment, targeted for frequencies from 1-100 GHz, derived from a ray tracing study in Arlington Heights, IL. As part of the proposed model, three different foliage conditions are studied so that users of the model can choose a foliage condition that best matches the environment they would like to study.