Impact of Humans on the Design and Performance of Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks in Stadiums

We use 3-D ray tracing to evaluate the performance of millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular in a realistic model of MetLife stadium, NJ, USA. We model thousands of human blockages using the dielectric properties at 28 GHz. Using this setup, we contrast the coverage and capacity performance with and without human blockages. Our study highlights that incorporating human models is essential for performance evaluation and also for deployment choice. We study the scaling in achievable data rates of three dense deployments in the stadium, and conclude that meeting the minimum 100 Mbps 5G requirement in stadiums can be challenging with a unicast mode of transmission. Broadcasting popular content in conjunction with a multiplexed unicast mode can provide minimum 100 Mbps rate for the broadcasted content.