Measurements of the 60 GHz UE to eNB Channel for Small Cell Deployments

In this letter, we report the results of a series of experiments which were performed to examine the impact of terminal handling and movement upon the user equipment (UE) to evolved NodeB (eNB) communications channel at 60 GHz. Three key utilization scenarios, in which a user imitated making a voice call, sending a text message or simply carrying the device in a pocket, are investigated. Each of these three user cases were studied under line of sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) channel conditions when the user was mobile in a range of different indoor and outdoor small cell scenarios. It is shown that the mode of UE operation (i.e., how the device is handled) will be important for future 60 GHz cellular applications. In particular, for short-range UE to eNB links which are in true NLOS, body shadowing is the dominating factor. To allow our results to be readily incorporated into network simulations, we have characterized the channel by decomposing the received signal into its constituent path loss, shadowed and small-scale fading components. In particular, we have had good success modeling the shadowed fading using the gamma distribution, whereas the small-scale fading observed in the LOS and NLOS channels has been appropriately modeled using the Rice and Nakagami- $m$ distributions, respectively.