Analytical characterization of the blockage process in 3GPP New Radio systems with trilateral mobility and multi-connectivity

Abstract

One of the recent major steps towards 5G cellular systems is standardization of 5G New Radio (NR) operating in the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band. This radio access technology (RAT) will potentially provide extraordinary rates at the access interface enabling the set of new bandwidth-greedy applications. However, the blockage of the line-of-sight (LoS) path between 3GPP NR access point (AP) and the user equipment (UE) is known to drastically degrade the performance of the NR communication links thus leading to potential outage conditions. Although the problem of characterizing LoS blockage process has been addressed in the recent literature, the proposed models are mostly limited to stationary locations of APs and UE. In our study, we characterize properties of the LoS blockage process under simultaneous mobility of both blockers and UE. The model is then extended to the cases of Poisson AP deployment, multi-connectivity, and mobility of AP representing ‘trilateral’ (three-sided) mobility model. We also specify a Markov-based model of the blockage process that can be efficiently used in both system level simulations and analytical analysis of 3GPP NR systems. Using this model we demonstrate how to derive various metrics of interest including (i) ,fraction of time in blockage, (ii) SNR and capacity process dynamics, (iii) probability that at time t UE is at the blockage or non-blockage state, (iv) mean and distribution of time to an outage.