Study of the Indoor Millimeter Wavelength Channel

In this paper, we conduct ray-tracing simulation studies using WinProp tool to understand the path loss, coverage area, diversity and delay spread of the 29GHz band in the indoor propagation environment, and compare the 29GHz indoor channel to the 2.9GHz indoor channel. In addition, we compare our simulation results with the measurement data from [4]. Based on our simulation results, we conclude that the 29GHz band has similar indoor channel characteristics as 2.9GHz and that any inherent impairment of the mmWave due to higher carrier frequency can easily compensated with beam forming techniques and other advanced algorithms. Specifically, our results show that the path loss exponents and the RMS delay spread values are similar at 29GHz and at 2.9GHz. In addition, our simulation results show that by having multiple access points on an office floor, we can significantly improve important diversity metrics such as the number of detectable beams and the angular separation of those beams, so as to make 29GHz system using beam forming technique more robust against beam blockage.