Ceiling- or Wall-Mounted Access Points: An Experimental Evaluation for Indoor Millimeter Wave Communications

This paper compares the received signal characteristics obtained for two access point (AP) mounting arrangements commonly encountered in indoor millimeter wave wireless networks, namely ceiling- and wall-mounted APs. To facilitate this, we consider three key user equipment (UE) usage scenarios, in which a user imitated making a voice call, operating an app and carrying the device in a pocket. For each of these UE cases, we investigate the fading characteristics of the millimeter wave channel at 60 GHz as the user walk toward and then away from the ceiling- and wall-mounted APs. Following this, the lognormal and κ-μ distributions are shown to provide a good fit to the shadowed and multipath fading, respectively. Based on the parameter estimates and model fitting, it is found that the choice between a ceiling- and wall-mounted position for the AP is dependent on the UE use case and whether the device is in line-of-sight (LOS) or non-LOS (NLOS).