A Simplified Interference Model for Outdoor Millimeter-wave Networks

Industry 4.0 is the emerging trend of the industrial automation. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is a prominent technology for wireless networks to support the Industry 4.0 requirements. The availability of tractable accurate interference models would greatly facilitate performance analysis and protocol development for these networks. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy of an interference model that assumes impenetrable obstacles and neglects the sidelobes. We quantify the error of such a model in terms of statistical distribution of the signal to noise plus interference ratio and of the user rate for outdoor mmWave networks under different carrier frequencies and antenna array settings. The results show that assuming impenetrable obstacle comes at almost no accuracy penalty, and the accuracy of neglecting antenna sidelobes can be guaranteed with sufficiently large number of antenna elements. The comprehensive discussions of this paper provide useful insights for the performance analysis and protocol design of outdoor mmWave networks.