Investigating the effects of antenna directivity on wireless indoor communication at 60 GHz

This paper investigates the nature of the indoor radio channel at 60 GHz, with regard to its use for future high bit-rate broadband wireless networks. It is proposed that, for operation in the millimetre-wave indoor channel, directional antennas can be used to mitigate multipath effects, thus reducing the need for complex equalisation or multi-carrier techniques. An image based, ray-tracing prediction model is used to study the channel characteristics and to analyse the variation in received power, RMS delay spread and k-factor within a typical operating environment. The performances of different antenna combinations are investigated and narrowbeam, suitably aligned antennas are shown to reduce received delay spread for both LOS and non-LOS locations. The effects of non-optimal antenna alignment are observed, and system outage is determined for certain system design criteria. The results suggest that it will feasible to combat multipath effects using switched-beam directional antennas.