Open AccessScalable Modeling of Human Blockage at Millimeter-Wave: A Comparative Analysis of Knife-Edge Diffraction, the Uniform Theory of Diffraction, and Physical Optics Against 60 GHz Channel Measurements
Author(s) -
Swagato Mukherjee,
Gregory Skidmore,
Tarun Chawla,
Anmol Bhardwaj,
Camillo Gentile,
Jelena Senic
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
ieee access
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.587
H-Index - 127
ISSN - 2169-3536
DOI - 10.1109/access.2022.3231812
Subject(s) - aerospace , bioengineering , communication, networking and broadcast technologies , components, circuits, devices and systems , computing and processing , engineered materials, dielectrics and plasmas , engineering profession , fields, waves and electromagnetics , general topics for engineers , geoscience , nuclear engineering , photonics and electrooptics , power, energy and industry applications , robotics and control systems , signal processing and analysis , transportation
Human blockage at millimeter-wave frequencies is most commonly modeled through Knife-Edge Diffraction (KED) from the edges of the body shaped as a vertical strip. Although extensively validated in controlled laboratory experiments, the model does not scale to realistic 3D scenarios containing multiple, randomly oriented human blockers, on which multipath signals can be incident from any direction. To address this, in this article we investigate numerical approaches based on ray-tracing methods. Predictions from two electromagnetic computational methods in addition to the KED, namely the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) and Physical Optics (PO), are compared to an extensive suite of precision measurements at 60 GHz. Besides the vertical strip, cylinder and hexagon body shapes are considered with the UTD method, and a 3D phantom shape is considered with the PO method. We found that the PO method is the most accurate, but also the most computationally intensive due to the large number of faces (approximately 8000) in the phantom and due to the inherent complexity of the method itself. While the UTD method with the hexagon shape (approximately 42 faces) is slightly less accurate than the PO method, it provides the best compromise when efficiency is paramount.