Blockage Effect and Beam Cooperation in Indoor Hotspot Based on 3GPP NR Blockage Model

High frequency millimeter wave (mmWave) band is the key carrier to enable multi-gigabit wireless communications. Due to high directivity and penetration loss of mmWave, a beam pair link (BPL) established between a transmitting beam and a receiving beam may be vulnerable to the blockage effect caused by user body and surrounding obstacles. While the existing work mostly considers the mmWave blockage problem in the outdoor scenario, this work studies the mmWave blockage effect in the indoor hotspot scenario where the shorter link distance and a higher blocker density are expected to magnify the blockage effect, compared to the outdoor counterpart. System-level simulations are carried out to assess the blockage effect based on the 3GPP New Radio (NR) channel and blockage models. To mitigate the blockage effect, a beam cooperation mechanism is used by configuring multiple BPLs for a user equipment. Extensive simulation results are presented that offer insights to the mmWave blockage problem in the indoor environment.