Effect of Beamforming on mmWave Systems in Various Realistic Environments

Recent works on the future 5G cellular communication proposed that the enormous raw bandwidth availability of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies is an excellent opportunity to increase data capacity and channel capacity. However, mmWave transmission requires beamforming to overcome the high path loss, as well as other losses due to rain and oxygen absorption and higher noise floor associated with larger bandwidth. This paper presents a comparison on the channel statistics of a mmWave systems operating using isotropic antenna against phased array beamforming in the 60GHz IEEE 802.11ad standard. Real world maps are incorporated into a 3-D mmWave ray-tracing tool for the purpose of employing realistic channel matrices into an 802.11ad bit level simulator. Different environments such as dense urban, urban, highway and residential area in Bristol and Malaysia are considered. Besides that, the throughput performance considering various MCS modes are also presented for both Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Single Carrier (SC) transmissions.