Analysis of Simulated and Measured Indoor Channels for mm-Wave Beamforming Applications

Ray tracing (RT)-assisted beamforming, where
beams are directly steered to dominant paths tracked by ray
tracing simulations, is a promising beamforming strategy, since
it avoids the time-consuming exhaustive beam searching adopted
in conventional beam steering strategies. The performance of
RT-assisted beamforming depends directly on how accurate the
spatial profiles of the radio environment can be predicted by the
RT simulation. In this paper, we investigate how ray tracingassisted
beamforming performs in both poorly furnished and
richly furnished indoor environments. Single user beamforming
performance was investigated using both single beam and multiple
beams, with two different power allocation schemes applied
to multi-beamforming. Channel measurements were performed
at 28-30 GHz using a vector network analyzer equipped with a
Biconical antenna as the transmit antenna and a rotated horn
antenna as the receive antenna. 3D ray tracing simulations were
carried out in the same replicated propagation environments.
Based on measurement and ray tracing simulation data, it is
shown that RT-assisted beamforming performs well both for
single and multi-beamforming in these two representative indoor
propagation environments.