Indoor Office Wideband Millimeter-Wave Propagation Measurements and Channel Models at 28 and 73 GHz for Ultra-Dense 5G Wireless Networks

Ultra-wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) propagation measurements were conducted in the 28- and 73-GHz frequency bands in a typical indoor office environment in downtown Brooklyn, New York, on the campus of New York University. The measurements provide large-scale path loss and temporal statistics that will be useful for ultra-dense indoor wireless networks for future mmWave bands. This paper presents the details of measurements that employed a 400 Megachips-per-second broadband sliding correlator channel sounder, using rotatable highly directional horn antennas for both co-polarized and cross polarized antenna configurations. The measurement environment was a closed-plan in-building scenario that included a line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight corridor, a hallway, a cubicle farm, and adjacent-room communication links. Well-known and new single-frequency and multi-frequency directional and omnidirectional large-scale path loss models are presented and evaluated based on more than 14 000 directional power delay profiles acquired from unique transmitter and receiver antenna pointing angle combinations. Omnidirectional path loss models, synthesized from the directional measurements, are provided for the case of arbitrary polarization coupling, as well as for the specific cases of co-polarized and cross-polarized antenna orientations. The results show that novel large-scale path loss models provided here are simpler and more physically based compared to previous 3GPP and ITU indoor propagation models that require more model parameters and offer very little additional accuracy and lack a physical basis. Multipath time dispersion statistics for mmWave systems using directional antennas are presented for co-polarization, cross polarization, and combined-polarization scenarios, and show that the multipath root mean square delay spread can be reduced when using transmitter and receiver antenna pointing angles that result in the strongest received power. Raw omnidirectional path loss data and closed-form optimization formulas for all path loss models are given in the Appendices.