Millimeter-Wave Cellular Wireless Networks: Potentials and Challenges

By Sundeep Rangan, Theodore Ted S. Rappaport, Elza Erkip. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2014

2,381 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz are a new frontier for cellular communication that offers the promise of orders of magnitude greater bandwidths combined with further gains via beamforming and spatial multiplexing from multielement antenna arrays. This paper surveys measurements and capacity studies to assess this technology with a focus on small cell deployments in urban environments. The conclusions are extremely encouraging; measurements in New York City at 28 and 73 GHz demonstrate that, even in an urban canyon environment, significant non-line-of-sight (NLOS) outdoor, street-level coverage is possible up to approximately 200 m from a potential low-power microcell or picocell base station. In addition, based on statistical channel models from these measurements, it is shown that mmW systems can offer more than an order of magnitude increase in capacity over current state-of-the-art 4G cellular networks at current cell densities. Cellular systems, however, will need to be significantly redesigned to fully achieve these gains. Specifically, the requirement of highly directional and adaptive transmissions, directional isolation between links, and significant possibilities of outage have strong implications on multiple access, channel structure, synchronization, and receiver design. To address these challenges, the paper discusses how various technologies including adaptive beamforming, multihop relaying, heterogeneous network architectures, and carrier aggregation can be leveraged in the mmW context.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a8761128af47bc419d44329b5aa18359345c639

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Citations in the corpus

Wideband Millimeter-Wave Propagation Measurements and Channel Models for Future Wireless Communication System Design (2015, methodology): “The floating intercept model parameters for the 28 and 73 GHz campaigns are slightly different here than those described in [40], due to an updated PDP thresholding algorithm that uses a more stringent 5 dB SNR threshold, and by separating the TX-RX path loss data points by RX antenna”
Digital Beamforming-Based Massive MIMO Transceiver for 5G Millimeter-Wave Communications (2018, background): “IN THE past few years, there has been growing interest in the utilization of millimeter-wave bands for fifthgeneration (5G) cellular communication systems [1]–[4].”
5G: A Tutorial Overview of Standards, Trials, Challenges, Deployment, and Practice (2017, positive): “3 technologies forming the backbone of 5G are densification [88], [89], [90], [91], [92], [93], [94], [95], [96], massive MIMO [88], [89], [90], [93], [97], [98], [15], [99] and mm-wave [100], [88], [89], [101], [93], [102], [103], [17], [104], [105], [106].”
Fundamental Limits of Caching in Wireless D2D Networks (2014, methodology): “An example of such analysis is provided in [6] for a D2D network with realistic propagation channel modeling operating at various frequency bands, from cellular microwave to mm-wave bands, as envisaged in the forthcoming 5G standardization [53]–[58].”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems (2015, background): “A major outstanding issue is characterizing the joint probabilities in outage between links from different cells, which is critical in assessing the benefits of macro-diversity [65], [66].”
Tractable Model for Rate in Self-Backhauled Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks (2014, background): “Investigations via detailed system level simulations [11]–[16] have shown large bandwidth mmWave networks in urban settings1 tend to be noise limited—i.”
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OpenAirInterface: A Flexible Platform for 5G Research (2014, positive): “Millimeter wave (mmW) bands between 30 and 300 GHz offer two orders of magnitude more spectrum than what is currently allocated for mobile cellular networks [15].”
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5G Millimeter-Wave Antenna Array: Design and Challenges (2017, background): “In recent years, a significant amount of research effort has been dedicated to the applications of mmw communication in outdoor scenarios, which is mainly motivated by the following two reasons [3, 4].”
End-to-End Simulation of 5G mmWave Networks (2017, background): “It is widely contended that 5G mmWave systems will target Time Division Duplex (TDD) operation because it offers improved utilization of wider bandwidths and the opportunity to take advantage of channel reciprocity for channel estimation [3], [14], [70]–[72].”
Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis of Multi-Tier Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks (2014, result): “These preliminary but encouraging results have motivated several researchers to investigate potential and challenges of mmWave cellular communications for wireless access, in the light of the large and unused spectrum available at these frequencies [3], [4].”
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Millimeter Wave MIMO With Lens Antenna Array: A New Path Division Multiplexing Paradigm (2015, methodology): “We consider a mmWave channel of L = 3 paths, which is typical in mmWave communications [5].”
Toward Low-Latency and Ultra-Reliable Virtual Reality (2018, background): “Due to the broadness of the subject, we by refer interested readers in mmWave communications to the seminal work on mmWave for 5G [9], [10] on potentials and challenges of mmWave communications, and [11] on challenges for achieving URLLC in 5G mmWave cellular networks. will be showcased as a way to…”