Antenna Placement and Performance Tradeoffs With Hand Blockage in Millimeter Wave Systems

The ongoing commercial deployment of millimeter wave systems brings into focus a number of practical issues in form factor user equipment (UE) design. With wavelengths becoming smaller, antenna gain patterns becoming directional, and link budgets critically dependent on beamforming, it becomes imper...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on communications Vol. 67; no. 4; pp. 3082 - 3096
Main Authors Raghavan, Vasanthan, Chi, Mei-Li, Tassoudji, Mohammad Ali, Koymen, Ozge Hizir, Li, Junyi
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 01.04.2019
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
3GPP
5G-new radio
Antenna arrays
Antenna gain
antenna placement
Antenna theory
Antennas
Array signal processing
Beamforming
Circuits
commercial deployments
Complexity
Directive antennas
Face
Form factors
hand blockage
Management
Millimeter wave
Millimeter waves
modular design
Modules
Placement
Power consumption
spherical coverage
Tradeoffs
UE design
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Summary:The ongoing commercial deployment of millimeter wave systems brings into focus a number of practical issues in form factor user equipment (UE) design. With wavelengths becoming smaller, antenna gain patterns becoming directional, and link budgets critically dependent on beamforming, it becomes imperative to use a number of antenna modules at different locations of the UE for good performance. While more antennas/modules can enhance beamforming array gains, it comes with the trade-off of higher component cost, power consumption of the associated radio frequency circuitry, and a beam management overhead in learning the appropriate beam weights. Thus, the goal of a good UE design is to provide robust spherical coverage corresponding to good array gains over the entire sphere around the UE with a low beam management overhead, complexity, and cost. The scope of this paper is to study the implications of two popular commercial millimeter-wave UE designs (a face and an edge design) on spherical coverage. We show that the analog beam codebooks can result in good performance for both the designs, and the edge design provides a better trade-off in terms of robust performance (with hand blockage), beam management overhead, implementation complexity from an antenna placement standpoint, and cost.
ISSN:0090-6778
1558-0857
DOI:10.1109/TCOMM.2019.2891669