A Study on the Coverage of Millimeter Wave (MMW) Communication Link for Fifth Generation (5G) Mobile Networks

Millimeter wave (MMW) communication is a promising technology to cope up with the ever increasing demand for multi gigabit wireless applications and to alleviate the problems of spectrum scarcity for Fifth generation (5G) mobile communication applications. The coverage distance of the MMW communication system is severely affected due to the various losses such as free space loss, atmospheric loss, and foliage loss. However MMW communication allows the use of smaller antenna size which can facilitate the fabrication of large antenna arrays over small area like a postage stamp which can be used at both transmitter and receiver. This helps in efficient use of the Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) technology in MMW Communication systems which can improve the coverage distance as well as capacity of the system. In this paper, we perform the Mathematical analysis of the coverage distance of MMW communication link and study the effects of different parameters on its performance. A simulation study to examine the effect of the MIMO antenna system for improving the coverage distance of MMW communication links for specific data rates for Line of Sight (LOS) and Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) cases in a highly dense mobile network scenario has been done and results are presented in this paper.