Characterizing the Impact of Diffuse Scattering in Urban Millimeter-Wave Deployments.

In this letter, we characterize the impact of diffuse scattering in dense urban deployments of millimeterwave (mmWave) systems by using an advanced raylaunching (RL) simulation tool. Specifically, we first construct an RL-based methodology which is well-suited for the proposed analysis, and then investigate the received power distribution both with and without the contribution resultant from the diffuse scattering of rays for both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) conditions. Simulation results are presented which show that, different from lower frequency bands, diffuse scattering makes a noticeable contribution to the total received power for NLOS links in the mmWave band. Therefore, when considering NLOS mmWave propagation in urban settings, it is critical to properly model and take into account specular attenuation due to surface roughness.