Analysis of Vegetation and Penetration Losses in 5G mmWave Communication Systems

The 5G network has been intensively studied within the early deployment stages as an effort to match the exponential growth of the number of connected devices and users, alongside with their increasing demands for higher throughput, bandwidth, and lower latency. Knowing that most of the frequency spectrum below 6 GHz is saturated, it is not feasible to rely only on the traditional frequency bands that are currently in use. Therefore, a promising solution to combat the insufficient frequency spectrum is to adopt new frequency bands for next-generation mobile communication systems. The primary effort has been focused on utilizing the millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands as the most promising candidate for the frequency spectrum. However, even though the mmWave frequency bands could fulfill the desired bandwidth requirements of 5G, it has been demonstrated to endure several issues such as scattering, atmospheric absorption, fading, and especially penetration losses compared to the existing sub-6 GHz frequency bands. Then, it is fundamental to optimize the mmWave band propagation channel to facilitate the practical 5G implementation for the network operators. In this paper, we simulated different scenarios in order to study the vegetation and penetration loss in 5G systems. Vegetation loss will be studied using the 28 GHz bandwidth and for the penetration loss we will study soft materials
$< 15\mathbf{dB}$
and hard materials
$> 20\mathbf{dB}$
.