Field‐Measurement‐Based Received Power Analysis for Directional Beamforming Millimeter‐Wave Systems: Effects of Beamwidth and Beam Misalignment

Abstract

To overcome considerable path loss in millimeter‐wave propagation, high‐gain directional beamforming is considered to be a key enabling technology for outdoor 5G mobile networks. Associated with beamforming, this paper investigates propagation power loss characteristics in two aspects. The first is beamwidth effects. Owing to the multipath receiving nature of mobile environments, it is expected that a narrower beamwidth antenna will capture fewer multipath signals, while increasing directivity gain. If we normalize the directivity gain, this narrow‐beamwidth reception incurs an additional power loss compared to omnidirectional‐antenna power reception. With measurement data collected in an urban area at 28 GHz and 38 GHz, we illustrate the amount of these additional propagation losses as a function of the half‐power beamwidth. Secondly, we investigate power losses due to steering beam misalignment, as well as the measurement data. The results show that a small angle misalignment can cause a large power loss. Considering that most standard documents provide omnidirectional antenna path loss characteristics, these results are expected to contribute to mmWave mobile system designs.

Keywords

• Beamforming
• Channel measurements
• Channel model
• Millimeter wave
• Multipath characteristics
• Path loss