Indoor Ray Tracing and Base Station Placement Optimization for mmWave Systems, BWAC Core Project

Ismail Guvenc

Project runs from 10/01/2019 to 09/30/2020
$50,000

Smart deployment of base stations (BSs) can help reduce the infrastructure costs while keeping the service quality at a desired minimum. The BS placement problem has been studied extensively for sub-6 GHz frequencies for both indoor and outdoor environments. However, the frequencies below 6 GHz are highly occupied, which makes frequencies at millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands attractive due to the vast amount of unused spectrum available for the fifth generation (5G) network. Besides, channel propagation characteristics of the mmWave band are significantly different from that of the sub-6 GHz band. mmWaves, due to using higher frequencies ranging from 30 to 300 GHz, are more vulnerable to blocking, and hence the presence of line-of-sight (LoS) links is more desired. Moreover, a typical mmWave link suffers an orders-of-magnitude larger path loss than a traditional sub-6 GHz link. Therefore, the mmWave network planning is more dependent on the layout of the environments. mmWave infrastructure also needs to be densely deployed to overcome the path loss and blockage problems, and to increase the LoS probability. This necessity may lead to many other problems, such as serious interference. The goal of this research is to understand the differences of network coverage in different bands for various indoor settings and to automate the mmWave BS placement with the aim of achieving high coverage with a minimum number of BSs.