Effect of Human Crowd Obstruction on the Performance of an Urban Small-Cell Millimeter-Wave Access Network

Hybridation between ray-based deterministic propagation modelling and statistical components is viewed as a promising solution to assess the performance of outdoor small-cell network designs or allocation techniques. In the solution presented in this paper, the main properties of the propagation channel (i.e. the specular paths, and the blockage by large objects) are simulated from the 3D geographical data and the ray-based model, while the effect of small or dynamic in- street objects, like vehicles and human bodies, can be appropriately reproduced by a stochastic procedure. A new feature of the solution consists in the creation of random clusters of human bodies in the surrounding of the users (the impact of the user body itself was previously introduced in the hybrid model as a stochastic factor). The application and interest of the new feature is illustrated in a radio access 60-GHz small-cell scenario, where small-cells are installed on lampposts and users are distributed in the street. The blockage by the human bodies affects the cell selection and beam orientation; the degradation of the service coverage is evaluated based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SINR) and for various human crowd densities.