28 GHz Millimeter Wave Cellular Communication Measurements for Reflection and Penetration Loss in and Around Buildings in New York City

In this paper, we present reflection coefficients and penetration losses for common building materials at 28 GHz for the design and deployment of future millimeter wave mobile communication networks. Reflections from walls and buildings and penetration losses were measured for indoor and outdoor materials, such as tinted glass, clear glass, brick, concrete, and drywall at 28 GHz in New York City. A 400 Mega-chip-per-second sliding correlator channel sounder and 24.5 dBi steerable horn antennas were used to emulate future mobile devices with adaptive antennas that will likely be used in future millimeter wave cellular systems [1]. Measurements in and around buildings show that outdoor building materials are excellent reflectors with the largest measured reflection coefficient of 0.896 for tinted glass as compared to indoor building materials that are less reflective. We also found that penetration loss is dependent not only on the number of obstructions and distance between transmitter and receiver, but also on the surrounding environment. The greatest penetration loss containing three interior walls of an office building was found to be 45.1 dB, with 11.39 m separation between the transmitter and receiver.