Material Characterization and Radio Channel Modeling at D-Band Frequencies

As the throughput requirements for wireless communication links keep rising, characterization of sub-THz radio channels is necessary. This paper presents the results of a radio channel measurement campaign in which we characterize the full D-band, ranging from 110 to 170 GHz, for distances up to 5 m. We measured penetration and reflection loss for a broad set of materials that are commonly used in indoor environments, including wood, glass, acrylic, and concrete, and measured corner diffraction losses. Measurements over the full 60 GHz bandwidth reveal frequency selectivity as well as a periodic variation of both penetration and reflection loss, which is attributed to the thin film effect. Based on measurements in a conference room and outdoors, we create a spatio-temporal channel model for the conference room and an outdoor path loss model. The channel models show that the radio channel is extremely sparse to multipath components, containing only a Line-of-Sight path with signal attenuation close to path loss in free space, and first-order reflections with a measured attenuation that corresponds to the sum of the path and reflection loss.