Observations on Large-Scale Attenuation Effects in a 26 GHz Urban Micro-Cell Environment

This letter presents a measurement campaign carried out in an FR2 urban outdoor environment in a live experimental network deployment. The radio propagation analysis from a physical perspective at 26 GHz is essential for the correct deployment and dimensioning of future communication networks. This study summarises and evaluates some of the typical effects encountered in a communications scenario such as penetration losses in a building, losses due to vegetation or the human body, or diffraction/scattering propagation around corners in street canyon-like environment given a FR2 live network.

FR2 5G Networks for Industrial Scenarios: An Experimental Characterization and Beam Management Procedures in Operational Conditions

Industrial environments constitute a challenge in terms of radio propagation due to the presence of machinery and the mobility of the different agents, especially at mmWave bands. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of a FR2 5G network deployed in an operational factory scenario at 26 GHz. The experimental characterization, performed with autonomous mobile robots that self-navigate the industrial lab, leads to the analysis of the received power along the factory and the evaluation of reference path gain models. The proposed assessment deeply analyzes the physical layer of the communication network under operational conditions. Thus, two different network configurations are assessed by measuring the power received in the entire factory, providing a comparison between deployments. Additionally, beam management procedures, such as beam recovery, beam sweeping or beam switching, are analyzed since they are crucial in environments where mobile agents are involved. They aim for a zero interruption approach based on reliable communications. The results analysis shows that beam recovery procedures can perform a beam switching to an alternative serving beam with power losses of less than 1.6 dB on average. Beam sweeping analysis demonstrates the prevalence of the direct component in Line-of-Sight conditions despite the strong scattering component and large-scale fading in the environment.