Spherical Coverage Characterization of Millimeter Wave Antenna Arrays in 5G Mobile Terminals

This paper studies and compares the spherical coverage performance of typical millimeter wave antenna array configurations in a 5G mobile terminal using the cumulative distribution function (CDF) as a basic figure of merit. The performance comparison is illustrated using distributed antenna arrays operating at 28 GHz with different antenna element locations on the mobile terminal. The study compares the pros and cons between co-located antenna array and distributed antenna array configuration with respect to the coverage and the peak gain performance. In conclusion, the study provides guidelines on how the antenna array elements need to be distributed and highlights the importance of placing the antenna elements on the mobile device's display side in order to achieve a given effective isotropic radiated power requirements both in free space and use scenarios with a user's hand.