Antenna Placement and Performance Tradeoffs with Hand Blockage in Millimeter Wave Systems

Abstract: The ongoing commercial deployment of millimeter wave systems brings into focus a number of practical issues in form factor user equipment (UE) design. With wavelengths becoming smaller, antenna gain patterns becoming directional, and link budgets critically dependent on beamforming, it becomes imperative to use a number of antenna modules at different locations of the UE for good performance. While more antennas/modules can enhance beamforming array gains, it comes with the tradeoff of higher component cost, power consumption of the associated radio frequency circuitry, and a beam management overhead in learning the appropriate beam weights. Thus, the goal of a good UE design is to provide robust spherical coverage corresponding to good array gains over the entire sphere around the UE with a low beam management overhead, complexity, and cost. The scope of this paper is to study the implications of two popular commercial millimeter wave UE designs (a face and an edge design) on spherical coverage. We show that analog beam codebooks can result in good performance for both the designs, and the edge design provides a better tradeoff in terms of robust performance (with hand blockage), beam management overhead, implementation complexity from an antenna placement standpoint and cost.