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Broadband Millimeter-Wave Propagation Measurements and Models Using Adaptive-Beam Antennas for Outdoor Urban Cellular Communications
Theodore S. Rappaport, Fellow, IEEE, Felix Gutierrez, Jr., Student Member, IEEE, Eshar Ben-Dor, Student Member, IEEE, James N. Murdock, Student Member, IEEE, Yijun Qiao, Student Member, IEEE, and Jonathan I. Tamir, Student Member, IEEE

AbstractThe spectrum crunch currently experienced by mobile cellular carriers makes the underutilized millimeter-wave frequency spectrum a sensible choice for next-generation cellular communications, particularly when considering the recent advances in low cost sub-terahertz/millimeter-wave complementary metaloxide semiconductor circuitry. To date, however, little is known on how to design or deploy practical millimeter-wave cellular systems. In this paper, measurements for outdoor cellular channels at 38 GHz were made in an urban environment with a broadband (800-MHz RF passband bandwidth) sliding correlator channel sounder. Extensive angle of arrival, path loss, and multipath time delay spread measurements were conducted for steerable beam antennas of differing gains and beamwidths for a wide variety of transmitter and receiver locations. Coverage outages and the likelihood of outage with steerable antennas were also measured to determine how random receiver locations with differing antenna gains and link budgets could perform in future cellular systems. This paper provides measurements and models that may be used to design future fth-generation millimeter-wave cellular networks and gives insight into antenna beam steering algorithms for these systems. Index TermsAngle of arrival (AOA), beamforming antennas, cellular, fth generation (5G), millimeter-wave propagation measurements, mobile communications, 38 GHz.
Manuscript received February, 2012; revised August, 2012; accepted November 25, 2012. Date of publication December 20, 2012; date of current version April 03, 2013. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and in part by Samsung DMC R&D Communications Research Team (CRT) and Samsung Telecommunications America, LLC. Portions of this paper were published in IEEEs Global Communications Conference [15], Radio Wireless Symposium [17], Wireless Networking & Communication Conference [18], and International Conference on Communications [19]. T. S. Rappaport is with NYU WIRELESS, New York University and also with Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), New York, NY USA 10003 (e-mail: tsr@nyu.edu). F. Gutierrez, Jr. is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 USA and also with NYU WIRELESS, Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA (e-mail: felixgutierrez@poly.edu). E. Ben-Dor is with Javelin Semiconductor, Inc., Austin, TX 78704 USA (e-mail: esharbd@gmail.com). J. N. Murdock was with the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 USA. He is now with Texas Instruments, Inc., Dallas, TX 75266 USA (e-mail: james.murdock741@gmail.com). Y. Qiao is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Rice University, Houston, TX 77251 USA (e-mail: markqiao@gmail.com) J. I. Tamir is with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA (e-mail: jtamir@eecs. berkeley.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TAP.2012.2235056

I. INTRODUCTION NDERSTANDING radio propagation is vital for the successful design and implementation of new wireless communication systems operating at higher frequencies and bandwidths. The advancement of sub-terahertz (THz) semiconductor technology has now made millimeter-wave cellular systems feasible [1]. While outdoor channel measurements at millimeter-wave frequencies (e.g., frequencies above 30 GHz, or wavelengths 10 mm or less) have been conducted by many (for example, rain attenuation [2][4]; foliage attenuation [5], [6]; multipath delay spread [7], [8]; angle of arrival (AOA) [9]; reection coefcients of materials [10], [11]; and coverage outage probability [12], [13]), past work has been done for either ground level or xed point (i.e., 28 GHz LMDS) wireless communications. Previous researchers have not considered the propagation of millimeter waves using steerable antennas for cellular/mobile applications. This paper provides a comprehensive propagation study for outdoor urban millimeter wave (e.g., sub-THz) cellular networks with beam steering. Our work considers a variety of elevated transmitters that represent typical fth-generation (5G) base-station locations at heights of two or more stories above ground level, and dozens of ground-level receiver locations. Highly directional steerable horn antennas at the transmitter and receiver were used to measure the propagation channel for angle of arrival (AOA), multipath time delay spread, and propagation path loss. An 800-MHz null-to-null passband bandwidth spread-spectrum sliding correlator channel sounder [14], [15], similar to that used in [4] and [16], was built to perform extensive outdoor cellular millimeter-wave propagation measurements at 37.625-GHz center frequency. An RF signal power of 22 dBm was delivered to the transmit base-station antenna, which was a 7.8 half-power beamwidth Ka-band vertically polarized 25-dBi horn antenna to produce 47-dBm EIRP [15], [17][19]. The receiver uses another Ka-band vertically polarized horn antenna of either 13.3-dBi gain (49.4 beamwidth), or 25-dBi gain (7.8 beamwidth). The idea of using beamsteering to form links within cellular networks is not new [20], [21], but past work has not considered the use of millimeter-wave spectrum and the additional capabilities of small form factor steerable antennas at the handset

0018-926X/$31.00 2012 IEEE

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Fig. 1. Use of highly directional receiver antennas in cellular millimeter-wave systems would signicantly reduce interference since co-channel interference from off-boresight directions would be rejected. Figure adapted from [20].

and base station for mobile/cellular use. Moving to the millimeter-wave spectrum would provide orders of magnitude of available spectrum to cellular carriers when compared to todays global 4G allocation, while simultaneously supporting inband backhaul. Spatial-division multiple access (SDMA) and beam/ path combining could be utilized along with temporal or frequency-based multiple-access techniques to greatly increase capacity and spectrum reuse. For example, in [22], a cell tower coverage region is broken into six sectors of 60 each, which yields at least a 5 increase in the number of users that a cell site can handle. The benets provided by spatial-division multiple-access (SDMA) systems [23] include an extended range due to high gain antennas, reduced interference by intelligently controlling the beam direction, and increased cell capacity. The problem of intercell interference, which currently plagues dense heterogeneous network deployments, would be signicantly reduced with the use of highly directional steerable beam antenna arrays at the mobile and/or base station. As illustrated in Fig. 1, interference becomes less likely due to the narrow beamwidth at the base station. Thus, millimeter-wave cellular systems are most likely to be noise limited at heavily shadowed locations rather than limited by interference. The use of small directional antennas leads to a new research eld of antenna pointing protocols. Early work on millimeter-wave antenna pointing protocols appears in [24], and is based on iterative antenna training using pseudonoise sequences. Additional millimeter-wave protocols for pointing antennas at both base station and mobile handsets were recently presented in [25] and [26], and through the use of narrowband pilot signals, antenna pointing directions and multipath angular spreads can be rapidly determined [27], [28]. Recently, Samsung Electronics proposed a multibeam cellular system operating at millimeter-wave frequencies (see Fig. 2). Steerable directional beams are used at the base station and mobile handset with the base stations also capable of communicating with each other for coordination and backhaul infrastructure [22]. As seen in Fig. 2, inner cells use wireless backhaul to send data to outer cells which have ber-optic links to the packet data server gateways [29], [33]. The cell size must be sufciently small to provide for substantial spectral reuse gains and sufcient capacity within the cell, yet large enough

Fig. 2. Cell system may use steerable antenna arrays to communicate with mobile devices using multiple beams. Wireless backhaul is used from the inner cells to the outer cells, where ber-optic connections move the data to the packet data server gateway. (Figure reproduced with permission from Jerry Z. Pi of Samsung Telecommunications America [29].)

to minimize the number of base stations and capital equipment costs. This work gives early insights into cell coverage density for typical urban millimeter-wave cellular deployments, and the potential for combining energy from multiple pointing angles using spatial multiple input multiple output (MIMO). Other studies of millimeter-wave cellular systems may be found in [30]. In this paper, we intentionally did not consider Doppler effects in our measurements, since Doppler is well understood to induce time-selective fading that can be mitigated by packet sizing and appropriate coding over the coherence time of the channel [14]. This paper is organized as follows. The experimental design and measurement methodology are explained in Section II. Results and analysis of path loss, multipath delay spread, and AOA measurements in urban outdoor environments are discussed in Section III. Section IV summarizes the results of this work and concludes this paper. II. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN FOR THE CELLULAR URBAN MEASUREMENTS Channel sounding requires spatial averaging over a local area in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and understand small-scale fading [14]. At each receiver location and for each TX-RX antenna orientation, we used a circular track to collect power delay proles (PDPs) at eight local-area measurement points spaced in 45 increments along the track. The radius of the track yielded a ( 8 cm) separation distance between adjacent measurement points along the circular track. The PDPs at each of the eight local-area measurement points were collected over a 2-s period and averaged together to form a single PDP. This process was repeated for each unique combination of TX and RX antenna pointing angles and for each receiver location [15], [19]. The assumption that received power does not change signicantly between local-area points was tested by calculating the standard deviation of the path loss in each set of eight local-area track points. The standard deviation of path

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loss over the local area was 1.20 dB, on average, with a maximum standard deviation of 1.74 dB at one location. The precise small-scale fading behavior of individual multipath components at millimeter-wave frequencies is the subject of current measurements in New York City. To capture the various line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) links present at each receiver location along the track, 25-dBi narrowbeam (7.8 beamwidth) horn antennas at the TX and RX were systematically and iteratively steered in the azimuth and elevation directions, emulating a beam-steering antenna-array architecture. For LOS links, the transmitter and receiver were pointed directly at each other in both azimuth and elevation directions, corresponding to 0 azimuth scanning angles for the transmitter and receiver. Often, it was possible to receive many NLOS links for different TX/RX pointing angle combinations, with multipath signals often 1020 dB weaker from the strongest received signal [15], [17]. Measurements were recorded for all observed LOS and NLOS links at all receiver locations. The transmitter was placed at four rooftop locations within the University of Texas at Austin campus: WRW-A, ENS-A, ENS-B, and ECJ. At each transmitter location, the antenna was mounted on a tripod 1.5 m above the roof toward the buildings edge. Fig. 3 shows a map of all transmitter and receiver locations. There were a total of 36 unique receiver locations in the environment, of which seven locations were measured from two different transmitter locations, yielding 43 unique TXRX measurement locations. At each measurement location, there were typically 8 to 12 unique antenna pointing combinations between the TX and RX that provided viable communication links, resulting in a total of 732 unique measured links, where each TXRX pointing angle combination was locally averaged at the receiver. All RX measurement locations used steerable receiver antennas with a 25-dBi vertically polarized rectangular horn antenna. In addition, about ve of the same receiver locations for each base-station transmitter were also measured using a wider beamwidth 13.3-dBi vertically polarized rectangular horn antenna. The 25-dBi receiver antenna locations ranged from 29 to 930 m from the transmitter. The 13.3-dBi antenna locations were between 70 m and 728 m from the transmitter. The rst transmitter location was on the northern edge of a ve-story rooftop (23 m) labeled as WRW-A. An image of the environment from the transmitter perspective is presented on the top left of Fig. 4. Eleven receiver locations were examined from WRW-A using the 25-dBi antenna, with six being partially obstructed and ve having clear LOS. Using the 13.3-dBi antenna, six receiver locations were measured, two of which were partially obstructed and four had clear LOS. Transmitter-to-receiver (TR) separation distances at WRW-A ranged from 61 to 265 m. The next two transmitter locations were an eight-story building (36 m) along the northern (ENS-A) and eastern (ENS-B) edges of the rooftop. Fig. 4 shows the perspective of the transmitters with the top right for ENS-A and bottom right for ENS-B. For ENS-A, ve of the 11 receiver locations were obstructed and six locations had clear LOS using the 25-dBi antenna and two of the ve selected receiver locations for the 13.3-dBi antenna measurements were obstructed.

Fig. 3. Map of the northeastern corner of the University of Texas at Austin campus showing the transmitter and receiver locations. All receiver locations were measured using a narrowbeam 25-dBi gain antenna. About half of the receiver locations were also measured using a wider beam 13.3-dBi antenna.

ENS-A locations had TR distances of 75 to 295 m. For ENS-B, three of the 11 receiver locations were obstructed and the rest had clear LOS. ENS-B had the longest TR distances of 132 to 930 m. The last transmitter location was at the northeastern corner of the ECJ building and was approximately 8 m above a parking lot and a busy four-lane street. The bottom left of Fig. 4 shows the transmitters perspective from ECJ. Most locations near the urban residential area were obstructed from the transmitter by foliage and, thus, the TR separations were shorter for ECJ, ranging from 29 to 225 m.

III. CELLULAR URBAN MEASUREMENT RESULTS A. AOA Distributions AOA distributions were generated for each transmitter location (e.g., base station). We dened a link as being any signal with lower path loss than 160 dB, which is the maximum measured by the channel sounder system [17], [19] . A scatter plot showing all of the receiver and transmitter azimuth angle combinations for all links made at the WRW-A transmitter location is shown in Fig. 5. The right side of Fig. 5 contains a histogram of the number of links for each receiver azimuth angle in 10 incremental bins. The bottom of Fig. 5 shows the distribution of transmitter azimuth angles. Only measurements performed with the 25-dBi RX antenna are included in the azimuth angle histograms since the narrower beam is better suited for AOA information. The 13.3-dBi RX antenna measurements were conducted in the same locations and yielded similar results, although the number of observed links was slightly less due to

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Fig. 4. Images of the four transmitter (base station) locations looking toward their environments: WRW-A (top left), ENS-A (top right), ECJ (bottom left), and ENS-B (bottom right).

Fig. 5. Scatter plot of the RX and TX azimuth angles for the links made with the WRW-A transmitter at 38 GHz. The distribution of links as a function of the transmitter azimuth angle for steerable 25-dBi transmitter and receiver antennas is shown below the scatter plot, and the distribution of the number of links as a function of the receiver azimuth angle and TR distance is seen to the right of the scatter plot.

a broader beamwidth that could not resolve individual links and 12 dB less link budget. The transmitter azimuth angle distribution in Fig. 5 is very narrow, with only 1.7% of the links having an off-boresight transmitter azimuth angle larger than . The concentration of transmitter azimuth angles near boresight could be explained by the low number of nearby scatterers in the rooftop environment. Hence, potential scatterers are more predominant at the ground-based mobile receiver antenna, which commonly

has a wide array of objects surrounding it. The data show that future millimeterwave base-station transmitter antennas need to point in the general direction of the receiver, and further suggest that base stations need not provide a beam that is steerable over more than a 60 span in urban environments. Indeed, as seen in Fig. 5, the angular path distribution for the receiver azimuth angles is more spread out, most notably for shorter TR distances, yet the majority of usable receiver antenna angles are still concentrated near boresight since these links tend to travel shorter distances (e.g., less path loss) and have less extreme reection angles. For the receiver, 70.7% of the links had azimuth angles within of boresight with 64.6% for links shorter than 150-m TR distance. A total of 75.9% of the links were made within (70.9% for links less than 150 m) and 84.5% within (81% for links less than 150 m). These numbers are summarized in Table I for all transmitter locations. The site-specic environmental features dominate propagation for millimeter wave cellular. For example, at base station WRW-A, many more links occur for the positive receiver azimuth angles due to the natural asymmetry of the transmitter antenna with respect to the nearby ENS building. ENS is situated northeast of WRW as seen in Fig. 6, and the transmitter location is almost exactly aligned with the western side of ENS. For the majority of measured locations, the receiver was placed in the courtyard seen in the upper left of Fig. 4. Thus, there was a larger open area to the right of the receiver in the westward direction than to its left where ENS blocked most of the eastern direction as seen in Fig. 6. The presence of ENS and other nearby multistory buildings (e.g., ECJ, PAT, RLM) reduced the number of large receiver azimuth angles by narrowing the view of the receiver antenna from both sides. This is especially true for receiver locations 4, 6, and 8. These types of behaviors were consistently observed throughout this study, suggesting that site-specic RF planning based on ray tracing or other predictive methods will be useful for deployments [18], [31] . The scatter plots and histograms for ENS-A and ENS-B transmitter locations are shown in Figs. 7 and 8, respectively. An even tighter distribution of transmitter azimuth angles was observed, since the increase in transmitter antenna height led to longer TR separation distances and fewer scatterers in the vicinity of the transmitter. However, the building spacing in the environments of ENS-A and ENS-B was much greater than for WRW-A as seen in Fig. 4. Therefore, a larger spread of receiver azimuth angles was observed for the ENS locations, with 53.3% and 66.1% of the links being less than off-boresight for ENS-A and ENS-B, respectively, and similar behavior when angles up to were considered as seen in Table I. The longer TR distances of ENS-B links and, thus, greater propagation loss explain why there are fewer links with large receiver angles. The ECJ transmitter location was the lowest in height, only 8 m above ground. One would expect a lower base-station antenna height would yield results that closely resemble ground communications links [15] rather than higher transmitter locations. Fig. 9 shows that only 11.5% of all links were made with transmitter azimuth angles greater than . And 64.8% of the receiver azimuth angles were less than for ECJ

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TABLE I SUMMARY OF THE RECEIVER AZIMUTH AOA DISTRIBUTIONS FOR ALL ENVIRONMENTS

Fig. 6. Environment of the WRW-A transmitter location. The transmitter position was nearly in line with the western side of ENS, thus reducing the number of reections coming from the receivers eastern direction (e.g., right side of image). Fig. 8. Scatter plot and distribution of the RX and TX azimuth angles for links at ENS-B at 38 GHz using steerable 25-dBi TX and RX antennas.

Fig. 7. Scatter plot and distribution of the RX and TX azimuth angles for links at ENS-A at 38 GHz using steerable 25-dBi TX and RX antennas.

growing to 75.4% of angles within of boresight. Similar results were measured when considering only links shorter than 150-m TR separation (see Table I). The ECJ environment included a parking lot and streets within 150 m from the transmitter location with several receiver locations near a residential area. At receiver locations near the transmitter, many scatterers were identied, including those at large azimuth angles off-boresight. On the other hand, fewer links with large receiver angles were found for the residential area receiver locations since these areas were heavily shadowed by trees, thus incurring additional penetration loss.

Fig. 9. Scatter plot and distribution of RX and TX azimuth angles for links at ECJ at 38 GHz using 25-dBi steerable antennas at TX and RX.

Overall, fewer large receiver azimuth angle links were made with the wider beam 13.3-dBi receiver antenna, since the smaller receiver antenna gain offers less link margin and is thus unable to detect paths traveling longer distances. The data in Figs. 59 show that lower base-station height yields a greater range of transmitter azimuth angles for creating links. The site-specic environment controls the distribution of receiver azimuth angles, since the majority of reectors are closer to

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TABLE II SUMMARY OF PATH-LOSS EXPONENTS AND STANDARD DEVIATION FOR ALL 38-GHZ CELLULAR MEASUREMENTS WITH STEERABLE TX AND RX ANTENNAS

the receiver position. These are key results that directly impact cell- and base-station layout and antenna design [18]. B. Propagation Path Loss Path loss was extracted for every measured multipath component (e.g., link) made with every unique pair of transmitter and receiver pointing angles across the 43 measurement locations. For each measured link, the radio path was identied as clear LOS for an unobstructed path when the TX and RX antennas were pointing at each other, partially obstructed LOS with some physical obstructions when the beams were pointed at each other, and NLOS links where antennas were pointed off boresight, thereby exploiting reections. Path loss scatter plots were modeled using the standard log-normal shadowing model [14], where the measured path loss data was tted with a MMSE best-t path loss exponent. The log-normal shadowing model is given by (1), where the path loss is in dB and is a function of distance and assumed to be a random value. Path loss is related to a close-in free-space reference distance, 5 m, and is modeled by the path loss exponent and a shadowing random variable which is represented as a Gaussian random variable in dB with zero mean and dB standard deviation [34]. (1) The log-normal shadowing model has been used to model any arbitrary link without consideration of antenna characteristics. However, the introduction of steerable and highly directional antennas leads to a signicant dependence of the path-loss exponent and on antenna orientations. Since TX and RX antennas were pointed at a wide range of angles, we considered radio propagation path loss for two cases: one case was when TX and RX antennas had a visible line of sight between each other, and were pointed at each other (LOS-directed), and the other case was when the RX and TX antennas did not have a visible LOS due to obstructions, and were not pointed at each other so that reections or scattering could be used to make a NLOS link (NLOS-directed). LOS-directed antennas consistently had lower path loss than NLOS, even in cases with partially obstructed LOS link due to foliage or edges of buildings. The propagation results were discussed previously in [17]. Table II summarizes those results. The measured data are further separated by transmitter locations with the model parameters summarized in Table III. Under the assumption that a system with antenna steering capability will rst search for the best possible link, the NLOS parameters are specied for the best (lowest path loss) NLOS link at

each receiver location. Table III shows that the transmitter location with the fewest partially obstructed LOS links, ENS-B, experienced the lowest LOS path loss including both clear and partially obstructed links with exponents of 2.01 and 2.03 for the 25-dBi and 13.3-dBi RX antennas, respectively. In contrast, the transmitter location with the most partially obstructed LOS links was ECJ, which had the highest LOS path-loss exponents of 2.99 and 2.74. It is worth noting from Table III that when a link could be made, the wider beam 13.3-dBi RX antenna provided less path loss when compared with the narrowbeam 25-dBi antenna at the exact same location, indicating that wider beamwidths capture more signal energy at the mobile RX, albeit with less overall link budget available. Another environment-dependent quantity is the variability of the path loss of LOS links, as expressed by , the standard deviation (e.g., shadowing) of the least-squares t error. By comparing ENS-B and ECJ LOS measurements, it is clear that the more obstructed regions, such as those measured from the ECJ base station, have a more variable LOS path loss than the less obstructed environment for the ENS-B transmitter. While ENS-B had modest variation in LOS path loss from its best t, resulting in shadowing standard deviation of 6.56 and 5.31 dB for the 25- and 13.3-dBi RX antennas, respectively, it can be seen that ECJ had a much higher shadowing variation of 13.92 and 12.46 dB. The strongest NLOS links also had greater variance at these more obstructed locations [32]. C. Millimeter-Wave Cellular RMS Delay Spread The RMS delay spreads cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) for all LOS and NLOS links at each transmitter location are shown in Fig. 10 using a 25-dBi receiver antenna. Some location-specic variations were observed since ENS-B had the lowest mean RMS delay spread of 5.3 ns versus the highest mean RMS delay spread of 16.5 ns at ECJ. As previously mentioned, differences in environment and TR separations make these two transmitter location links quite different from each other. Another noticeable trend is the 99-percentile values, which show that WRW-A and ENS-B had signicantly lower maximum RMS delay spreads (65.4 ns and 27.6 ns at 99%, respectively) than the other two environments. A possible reason for WRW-A having fewer very high RMS delay spread links is that none of the WRW-A receiver locations were near a street, while the other transmitter environments contained receiver locations adjacent to a wide street. The street was found to be a good environment for yielding high RMS delay spreads, since it has many reective objects spaced in nearly regular intervals for long distances and very few obstructions that block reected or scattered waves. For example, a street is typically lined with parked vehicles for many tens of meters. In addition, a street has many light poles, moving vehicles, surrounding buildings, street signs, and pedestrians, all of which have been found to be reectors at millimeter-wave frequencies [15]. ENS-B links had, on average, a longer separation distance. These longer links had signicantly lower delay spreads due to the attenuation of longer traveling paths, as discussed in Section III. The dependence on receiver antenna gain can be seen by comparing the results in Figs. 10 and 11, which plot the CDFs between RX antennas. While all of the plots in Fig. 10 look sim-

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TABLE III SUMMARY OF PATH-LOSS EXPONENTS AND SHADOWING STANDARD DEVIATIONS FOR ALL TRANSMITTER AND RECEIVER LOCATIONS AND LINKS AT 38 GHZ

nite probing pulse width, and no multipath distortion from propagation) with one partially obstructed LOS link resulting in a maximum of 15.5 ns. The NLOS measurements exhibited higher and more varied RMS delay spreads, with a mean of 14.8 ns for the 25-dBi receiver antenna and 13.7 ns for the 13.3-dBi receiver antenna. The maximum NLOS RMS delay spreads were 185 and 166 ns for the 25- and 13.3-dBi receiver antennas, respectively. Nonetheless, more than 80% of the NLOS links had RMS delay spreads under 20 ns and 90% of the NLOS links had RMS delay spreads under 40 ns. D. Trends in RMS Delay Spread
Fig. 10. RMS delay spread CDFs for each transmitter location and a CDF for all of the measured links using the steerable 25-dBi RX antenna at 38 GHz. The expected and 99-percentile values for each CDF are displayed on the plot.

Fig. 11. RMS delay spread CDFs for each transmitter location and a CDF for all of the measured links using the steerable 13.3-dBi RX antenna at 38 GHz. The expected and 99-percentile values for each CDF are displayed on the plot.

ilar to each other (except for ENS-B that has long TR separation distances), a much wider variety of CDFs was produced when using the wider beam antenna. As discussed later, the system sensitivity had a strong effect on the RMS delay spread, as the lower gain 13.3-dBi RX antenna had higher RMS delay spreads at smaller TR separations compared to the 25-dBi antenna, yet the lower gain RX antenna had lower RMS delay spreads at locations with longer TR separations. As discussed in [17], a considerable difference in RMS delay spreads between LOS and NLOS links was observed. Most LOS measurements had very minimal RMS delay spread, on the order of 1 ns, due solely to the transmitted pulse shape (i.e.,

To build power-efcient, low-overhead millimeter-wave mobile communication systems, future systems will require the ability to adjust antenna pointing angles, while jointly considering multipath delay spread and path loss needed to make a suitable link. The characteristics of the RMS delay spread from this measurement campaign were studied in [17], where it was found that the mean and worst case RMS delay spread increase as the antenna angle is pointed away from the LOS angle (e.g., boresight) at the TX and RX. It was also found that mean and worst case RMS delay spread decrease with increasing TR separation distances. The main reason for these trends is that a stronger received signal is caused by one or a few strong multipath components arriving at different specic angles. These strong multipath components dominate the delay spread and motivate the use of millimeter-wave cellular where directional low path-loss links can carry very high data rates with small RMS delay spread. However, when the TX and RX antennas are steered away from each other at relatively close TR separation distances of a couple of hundreds of meters or less, strong LOS and other strong multipath components are less likely, and the RMS delay spread becomes much greater since multipath components arrive from many different scattering and reection mechanisms. At greater TR separation distances beyond several hundred meters, the number of receivable multipath components decreases due to propagation loss, thus causing fewer detectable multipath components and smaller RMS delay spreads. Since our data show that RMS delay spread increases and becomes more variable as TX and RX antennas are pointed away from boresight, future mobile devices at a particular location should prefer a link using relatively small off-boresight antenna pointing angles ( ) compared to a link of similar strength that uses large pointing angles off boresight ( ) [17]. Finally, when considering the cell edge where the TR separation may be nearly a kilometer, the measurement results show that

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TABLE IV A COMPARISON OF THE OUTAGE STATISTICS FOR THE TWO TX LOCATIONS

expected RMS delay spreads are very low. Thus, less equalization is required near the cell edge. The reduced power and latency for equalization of these cell-edge links can be put to use in other processing areas, such as additional error coding for this lower SNR case. E. Cellular Urban Outage Study An important open question for a cellular millimeter-wave system in dense outdoor urban settings is the extent of cell coverage for a given transmitter height. The AOA studies discussed previously showed that NLOS paths exist and can be used to increase coverage. The extent of the coverage was examined in [18]. The cellular outage study was performed at the University of Texas at Austin campus with measurements made within approximately 400 m around the transmitter locations. Measurements from two transmitter locations provided outage probability for base stations of different heights. The probability was also broken into outages present for a system with sensitivity of up to 160-dB path loss and a less sensitive system with up to 150-dB path loss for the smaller gain RX antenna case. The outage probability is summarized in Table IV. As expected for the lower elevation transmitter (TX2-WRW), links over 200 m were made less frequently than at the higher transmitter location TX1-ENS, resulting in an outage rate of 39.6% based on a system sensitivity of 160-dB path loss. It is important to note that for both the high and low base-station transmitter locations, no outages were observed for all random measurement locations within a 200-m radius. In addition, the lower transmitter position beneted from a larger number of suitable reectors in the environment for links less than 200 m away, since the vertical angle of incidence from the low transmitter location to a given reector was reduced compared to incidence from the high transmitter location. This led to a higher number of links with TR separation under 200 m that had less than 150-dB path loss at the lower TX location than at the higher TX location (10% outage compared to 27.3%). Further work in other urban environments is needed to determine whether 200 m offers complete coverage for millimeter wave cellular. IV. CONCLUSION While several past studies have characterized the outdoor millimeter-wave channel for wireless backhaul and ground-level communications, there has been a signicant lack of information about the millimeter wave cellular (base-station to mobile) channel. Our work has provided 38-GHz radio propagation channel data for outdoor systems capable of implementing antenna beam steering. The work here considered

typical future-generation cellular base-station locations using steerable antennas at both receiver and transmitter locations, in both azimuth and elevation directions. We measured AOA statistics of viable RF links. It was shown that the elevated transmitters at heights of two to eight stories above ground require 60 of scanning (up to off-boresight) in the azimuth direction to cover nearly all possible NLOS links. The receiver antenna, however, would benet from larger scanning freedom. A NLOS link is rarely preferred over an LOS or partially obstructed LOS link, since NLOS links tend to have 10 to 50 dB more path loss and higher expected RMS delay spread. When the LOS direction is completely blocked by a building or other shadowing objects, the work here shows that a reection, scattered, or diffraction path may still have sufcient signal strength to be received, albeit at a lower signal level. Distant-dependent propagation path-loss models were provided to account for LOS, NLOS, as well as the best possible path provided in NLOS conditions when using steerable antennas at the TX and RX. Our outage study indicates that increasing the base-station transmitter height in a dense urban environment provides coverage to a greater percentage of locations past 300 m from the transmitter, but the improvement is spotty in that large regions past 300 m still lack coverage [18]. Our outage study indicates that a lower base station is able to use many reectors in the environment to cover all locations within a 200-m radius from the base station. This work suggests that millimeter-wave cellular systems may work best in dense urban environments with microcell deployments with cell radii less than 200 m. This study answered important questions regarding path loss, RMS delay spread, and signal coverage for millimeter-wave urban outdoor cellular channels for steerable antenna architectures. However, many additional measurements are needed to cover all environments of interest and to develop full channel models for standards development. These are likely to include antenna angle-dependent channel models due to the directionality and steerability of these novel communication systems. Moreover, the spatial and temporal small-scale variations are of great interest at these short wavelengths; thus, extensive work remains to develop a complete millimeter-wave cellular channel model. Finally, large environment dependency of receiver and transmitter AOA distributions suggests the usefulness of sitespecic cell design using ray-tracing models. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank students T. Forbes, S. J. Lauffenburger, and A. Duran for their contributions to the project, Samsung researchers S. Rajagopal, S. Abu-Surra, and J. Z. Pi for their ongoing interest and support of this work, Hughes Research Laboratory and National Instruments for donating equipment, and the reviewers and editor for their helpful comments. This work was sponsored by Samsung DMC R&D Communications Research Team (CRT) through Samsung Telecommunications America, LLC. REFERENCES
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Theodore S. Rappaport (F98) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, in 1982, 1984, and 1987, respectively. He is an Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineering Alumnus and Distinguished Engineering Alumnus from his alma mater. He holds the David Lee/Ernst Weber Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), Brooklyn, NY, USA, and is Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Radiology at NYU. In 2012, he founded NYU WIRELESS, a multidisciplinary research center involving NYUs engineering, computer science, and medical schools. Earlier in his career, he founded the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), USA. Prior to UT, he was on the electrical and computer engineering faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA, where he founded the Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group (MPRG), one of the worlds rst university research and teaching centers dedicated to the wireless communications eld. In 1989, he founded TSR Technologies, Inc., Blacksburg, a cellular-radio/personal-communications-services software radio manufacturer that pioneered cellular E-911 and test equipment that he sold in 1993 to what is now CommScope, Inc. In 1995, he founded Wireless Valley Communications Inc., Austin, TX, USA, a site-specic wireless network design and management rm that was sold in 2005 to Motorola, Inc. He has testied before the U.S. Congress, has served as an international consultant for the ITU, has consulted for more than 30 major telecommunications rms, and works on many national committees pertaining to communications research and technology policy. He is a highly sought-after consultant and technical expert, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Marconi Society. He has authored or coauthored more than 200 technical papers, over 100 U.S. and international patents, and several best-selling technical books. Dr. Rappaport was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) in 2006, and was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) in 2008 and 2011.

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Felix Gutierrez, Jr. (S08) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin (UT), USA, in 2006, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA, in 2008, and is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at UT. He completed an internship with ETS-Lindgren, Cedar Park, TX, USA, in 2010. He is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), Brooklyn, NY, USA. He has worked on millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz semiconductor circuits and antennas for next-generation wireless communications.

Yijun Qiao (S08) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, in 2012 and is currently a graduate ECE student at Rice University, Houston, TX. As an Engineering Honors student, he joined Prof. Theodore S. Rappaports research team in Fall 2010 and worked on the millimeter-wave channel sounding project for one year. He developed a measurement track now being used for propagation research at Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Eshar Ben-Dor (S08) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus, OH, USA, in 2009 and the M.S.E. degree with a focus on integrated microwave circuits and millimeter-wave communications from the University of Texas at Austin (UT) in 2011 During his time at OSU, he worked part-time in the Nanoscale Patterning Laboratory on electron-beam lithography resist technology. Currently, he is an IC Design Engineer at Javelin Semiconductor, Austin, TX, focusing on cellular-phone complementary metaloxide semiconductor power ampliers.

Jonathan I. Tamir (S11) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, in 2011 and is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, with a focus on signal processing for medical imaging and communication systems.

James N. Murdock (S10) received the B.S.E.E. and M.S.E. degrees in electrical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) in 2008 and 2011, respectively. He has co-authored two journal publications and 11 conference or magazine publications. In 2011, he completed an internship at Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX, USA, in sub-THz antenna design. Currently, he is an Analog Design Engineer with Texas Instruments, where he focuses on low-power radio frequency design. His research interests include sub-THz/THz design, low-power design, and scientic data archiving. Mr. Murdock volunteers with the United Way, FIRST Robotics, and Communities in Schools Dallas Region.