Analysis of Urban Millimeter Wave Microcellular Networks

Millimeter wave (mmWave) networks are sensitive to blockages due to buildings in urban areas. This is critical for vehicle-to-infrastructure networks which are cellular networks designed to support emerging vehicular applications. Motivated by measurement and ray tracing results in urban microcells, instead of characterizing the pathloss by Euclidean distance, we calculate it by the weighted sum of segment length along the propagation path, i.e., Manhattan distance, and a certain corner loss at the intersections along the path. We analyze network performance by modeling the urban microcell network by a Manhattan Poisson line process. Our results show significant differences between Manhattan and Euclidean distance- based pathloss models. Assuming the receiver is associated with the base station (BS) with the smallest pathloss, we derive closed-form expression of the distribution of the associated link pathloss. We obtain the coverage probability and reveal the impacts of interference from the LOS and NLOS BSs. It is shown that in this scenario the interference from a NLOS parallel street is negligible.