Outdoor Wideband Channel Measurements and Modeling in the 3–18 GHz Band

Fifth generation cellular systems will operate in a wide range of frequencies, covering both the traditional cellular bands, and mm-wave frequency bands, either selecting a specific band or operating in multiple bands simultaneously. For the design of such systems, a detailed understanding of the frequency dependence of the propagation channel is essential. While many channel measurements exist in either microwave bands ( 20 GHz), the results are not easily comparable, and furthermore the transition between these bands is not well studied. This paper aims to bridge the gap by providing the results from a channel measurement campaign conducted in urban macro and micro-cellular environments, over the continuous frequency band of 3–18 GHz. We characterize the pathloss, shadow fading, root-mean-square (RMS) delay spreads, Ricean factor and coherence bandwidth in urban macro-cellular and urban micro-cellular environments. Measurements were taken in both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments. The pathloss exponents and the RMS delay spreads increase with the base station height in NLOS environment; but not much dependency is observed in the LOS environment. By dividing the wideband channel transfer function into subbands of 1 GHz each, we study the frequency dependence of pathloss, shadow fading, Ricean factor, delay spread, and coherence bandwidth in the 3–18 GHz band. The pathloss exponents vary significantly with frequency, but not-monotonically. The shadow fading and the Ricean factor increase with frequency. The RMS delay spreads decrease with frequency in the LOS environments, but they do not change significantly in the NLOS environments. The coherence bandwidth values do not change significantly with frequency in either environment.