IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 14, 2015 735
Large-Scale Fading Characteristics of
Indoor Channel at 45-GHz Band
Jin Zhu, Haiming Wang, Member, IEEE, and Wei Hong, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—The channel measurement and modeling of large-
scale fading characteristics of 45-GHz band in three typical indoor
environments are investigated. An automatic measurement system
owning a sufficient dynamic range is designed to overcome the
prominent attenuation in 45-GHz band. After conducting exten-
sive measurements, large-scale fading characteristics including
path-loss exponent, cross-polarization discrimination ratio, and
standard deviation of shadow fading are obtained and compared
in different scenario setups. Goodness-of-fit test is applied to val-
idate whether the assumed log-normal distribution can describe
the shadow fading characteristics.
Index Terms—45 GHz, indoor channel, large-scale fading,
shadow fading.
I. INTRODUCTION
R
EQUIREMENTS for higher quality and better user expe-
rience lead to the booming of various novel wireless com-
munication technologies possessing higher throughput. More-
over, with the rapid advances of CMOS radio frequency inte-
grated circuit technologies and low-cost circuit integration so-
lutions, millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless communication
technologies have attracted great interest from academia and in-
dustry. As the conventional techniques are limited in the lower
frequency bands, e.g. 2.4 and 5 GHz, the mmWave frequency
band is considered to be a promising candidate for the new-gen-
eration wireless local access network (WLAN) systems due to
its availability of unused wide bandwidth. IEEE 802.11aj, which
operates on 45-GHz band with bandwidth up to 5.9 GHz, was
proposed in 2012 [1].
One of the biggest challenges for the system design of
mmWave wireless communications is high propagation loss
due to high frequency. Channel measurements on wireless
communication systems, such as IEEE 802.15.3c/802.11ad and
5G cellular, include, but are not limited to, [2]–[6]. In this letter,
to get a detailed insight into large-scale fading characteristics
for the new frequency band, a large amount of measurements
in different scenarios have been conducted in three typical
environments including a conference room, a living room, and
a cubicle office. Using a classical path-loss (PL) model, the
fading characteristics of 45-GHz band including PL exponent,
Manuscript received October 13, 2014; accepted November 25, 2014. Date
of publication December 05, 2014; date of current version March 02, 2015.
This work was supported in part by the 973 Program of China under Grant No.
2013CB329002, the NSF of China under Grant No. 61132003, and the NSF of
Jiangsu Province of China under Grants BK2011019 and BK20130631.
The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, South-
east University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: hmwang@seu.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2014.2377952
Fig. 1. Automatic channel measurement setup.
TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF THREE ANTENNAS
cross-polarization discrimination ratio (XPR), and standard
deviation of shadow fading are then obtained.
II. CHANNEL MEASUREMENT CAMPAIGN
A. Measurement Equipment and Setup
As shown in Fig. 1, a computer is used to not only control
the rotary table via the RS-232 port, but also control the signal
generator and the vector network analyzer (VNA) using the
LAN. An Agilent signal generator E8257D is used to transmit
continuous wave signal in power of 10 dBm. Then, the received
signal is recorded by an Agilent VNA N5245A. The signal is
transmitted from the independent signal generator instead of
the VNA to avoid the large cable loss due to the long cable.
Therefore, the dynamic range of this channel measurement
system can be increased using such a configuration. Three types
of linearly polarized antennas including the horn antenna, the
open ended waveguide (OEW) antenna, and the V-dipole an-
tenna (VDA) [7], with radiation characteristics listed in Table I,
are used in the channel measurements. Both copolarization and
cross-polarization measurements are conducted. Before the
practical channel measurement, the signal generator is directly
connected to the VNA to obtain calibration data.
In the line-of-sight (LoS) scenario, the transmit/receive
(Tx/Rx) antennas are both rotated to be aligned to each other
according to its specific three-dimensional coordinates. In the
non-LoS (NLoS) scenario, in conference and living rooms, the
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