Coverage and outage capacity evaluation in 5G millimeter wave cellular systems: impact of rain attenuation

The next generation cellular networks will operate at millimeter wave frequency bands. These cellular networks may be used for access, fronthaul and backhaul networks. For the reliable design of them, the propagation phenomena should be accurately incorporated. More specifically, in this paper we investigate the impact of rain attenuation, which is the most dominant tropospheric mechanism for frequencies above 10GHz, in small outdoor cells. We consider a realistic combined channel model that captures the propagation effects of shadowing and rain attenuation and we evaluate the coverage and the outage capacity in millimeter wave cellular systems that have been proposed for 5G radio networks.