Characterization of Human Body Shadowing in Measured Millimeter-wave Indoor Channels

In this paper, the human shadowing effect is studied at the millimeter-wave band centered at 28 GHz. The analysis takes a holistic view of the opportunities and challenges that are brought by the presence of a human in the millimeter-wave channel. The impact of human body shadowing on the antenna array performance is investigated, where the impairments due to the non-stationarity over the antenna array caused by human-induced shadowing are presented. The spatial-delay information is obtained using a frequency-invariant beamforming algorithm. The measured channel in a free space scenario is compared with the channel when a human subject and a metallic cylinder of similar size to the human subject are present in the channel. The results show that despite a high shadowing attenuation when the human blocks the propagation paths, there are opportunities presented by the presence of the human which can enhance the spatial diversity of the channel at some spatial locations.