The Impact of Mobile Blockers on Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems

Millimeter wave communication systems can provide high data rates, but the system performance may degrade significantly due to interruptions by mobile blockers, such as humans or vehicles. High-frequency interruptions and lengthy blockage durations will degrade the quality of the user's experience. A promising solution is to employ the macrodiversity of base stations (BSs), where the user equipment (UE) can handover to other available BSs if the current serving BS gets blocked. However, an analytical model to evaluate the system performance of dynamic blockage events in this setting is unknown. In this paper, we develop a line-of-sight (LOS) dynamic blockage model and evaluate the probability, duration, and frequency of blockage events considering all the links to the UE which are not blocked by buildings or the user's own body. For a dense urban area, we also analyze the impact of non-LOS links on blockage events. Our results indicate that the minimum density of the BS required to satisfy the quality of service requirements of ultra-reliable low-latency communication applications will be driven mainly by blockage and latency constraints, rather than coverage or capacity requirements.