Channel Characteristics and User Body Effects in an Outdoor Urban Scenario at 15 and 28 GHz

The effect of a user's body on channel characteristics for single user downlink transmission in an urban scenario for the fifth generation (5G) systems is investigated with ray-tracing at 15 and 28 GHz. Three different designs of user equipment (UE) antennas are fabricated and integrated into a mobile phone prototype, and their 3-D radiation patterns are measured both with and without a user. The user remains in Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) standard data mode and talk mode during measurements. The results show that the user's body will cause a strong shadowing loss and generate a large fluctuation on the received signal strength of the UE at both 15 and 28 GHz, which is crucial to channel modeling studies at frequencies above 6 GHz. In addition, the user's body effect on a linear array system in an UE is presented, and the main challenges for the future work are also addressed.