Ricean K-factor measurements in a home and an office environment in the 60 GHz band

Current Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) systems operate mainly at the 2.4 and 5.2 GHz frequency bands, which are becoming increasingly congested and, especially for the case of 2.4 GHz, they suffer from large amounts of interference. In this paper, the authors investigate the potential of utilising mm-wave frequency bands for enabling ultra-broadband WLAN communications. At these frequencies the attenuation due to free-space propagation and due to reflections is significantly higher compared to lower (microwave) frequencies. As a result, the areas of usable levels of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) are usually restricted to Line-of-Sight (LoS) areas. In order to verify this prediction and to evaluate the strength of the LoS signal relative to the scattered power a measurement campaign was conducted in a home and an office environment at 62.4 GHz. The measurement methodology and the outcomes from this study appear in this paper.