Ray-tracing based 5G Coverage Analysis and Capacity Evaluation in an Indoor Hotspot Scenario

As an important scenario in the vision of “smart buildings”, office buildings are a typical indoor hotspot environment and therefore, require seamless connectivity and massive data transfer with Gbps throughput. In China, the band of 3.3-3.4 GHz has been allocated for the indoor deployment of fifth-generation mobile communication system (5G). Compared to lower frequencies, the 3.3-3.4 GHz band suffers a larger propagation loss. Moreover, modern office buildings are composed of various scenarios such as open/closed offices, open spaces, corridors, and so on which have distinguished physical and geometrical features that complicate wave propagation. As a result, it is challenging to deploy a high-quality 5G network in such a complex indoor environment. In this paper, we conduct extensive ray-tracing (RT) simulations in a typical office building at the 3.3-3.4 GHz band. Based on the findings through analyzing the coverage in every separate scenario, a solution of optimal deployment of transmitters (TXs) is presented to meet the requirement of the synchronization signal reference signal received power (SS-RSRP). The channel capacity is evaluated through system-level simulations, implying that with the proposed solution in this paper, the peak throughput can reach 1.5 Gbps in certain areas while future efforts should be made to improve the throughput in the areas suffering strong interference caused by omni-directional Tx antennas. These results provide valuable insights into the system design and evaluation for 5G communication-empowered smart buildings.