Limited by Capacity or Blockage? A Millimeter Wave Blockage Analysis

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems can provide high data rates but the system performance may degrade significantly due to mobile blockers and the user's own body. A high frequency of interruptions and long duration of blockage may degrade the quality of experience. For example, delays of more than about 10ms cause nausea to VR viewers. Macro-diversity of base stations (BSs) has been considered a promising solution where the user equipment (UE) can handover to other available BSs, if the current serving BS gets blocked. However, an analytical model for the frequency and duration of dynamic blockage events in this setting is largely unknown.In this paper, we consider an open park-like scenario and obtain closed-form expressions for the blockage probability, expected frequency and duration of blockage events using stochastic geometry. Our results indicate that the minimum density of BS that is required to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of AR/VR and other low latency applications is largely driven by blockage events rather than capacity requirements. Placing the BS at a greater height reduces the likelihood of blockage. We present a closed-form expression for the BS density-height trade-off that can be used for network planning.