The millimeter wave (mmWave) band, a prime candidate for 5G cellular networks, seems attractive for wireless energy harvesting since it will feature large antenna arrays and extremely dense base station (BS) deployments. The viability of mmWave for energy harvesting though is unclear, due to the differences in propagation characteristics, such as extreme sensitivity to building blockages. This paper considers a scenario where low-power devices extract energy and or information from the mmWave signals. Using stochastic geometry, analytical expressions are derived for the energy coverage probability, the average harvested power, and the overall (energy-and-information) coverage probability at a typical wireless-powered device in terms of the BS density, the antenna geometry parameters, and the channel parameters. Numerical results reveal several network and device level design insights. At the BSs, optimizing the antenna geometry parameters, such as beamwidth, can maximize the network-wide energy coverage for a given user population. At the device level, the performance can be substantially improved by optimally splitting the received signal for energy and information extraction, and by deploying multi-antenna arrays. For the latter, an efficient low-power multi-antenna mmWave receiver architecture is proposed for simultaneous energy and information transfer. Overall, simulation results suggest that mmWave energy harvesting generally outperforms lower frequency solutions.
Millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular systems will require high-gain directional antennas and dense base station (BS) deployments to overcome a high near-field path loss and poor diffraction. As a desirable side effect, high-gain antennas offer interference isolation, providing an opportunity to incorporate self-backhauling , i.e., BSs backhauling among themselves in a mesh architecture without significant loss in the throughput, to enable the requisite large BS densities. The use of directional antennas and resource sharing between access and backhaul links leads to coverage and rate trends that significantly differ from conventional UHF cellular systems. In this paper, we propose a general and tractable mmWave cellular model capturing these key trends and characterize the associated rate distribution. The developed model and analysis are validated using actual building locations from dense urban settings and empirically derived path loss models. The analysis shows that, in sharp contrast to the interference-limited nature of UHF cellular networks, the spectral efficiency of mmWave networks (besides the total rate) also increases with the BS density, particularly at the cell edge. Increasing the system bandwidth does not significantly influence the cell edge rate, although it boosts the median and peak rates. With self-backhauling, different combinations of the wired backhaul fraction (i.e., the fraction of BSs with a wired connection) and the BS density are shown to guarantee the same median rate (QoS). Millimeter wave (mmWave) holds promise as a carrier frequency for fifth generation cellular networks. Because mmWave signals are sensitive to blockage, prior models for cellular networks operated in the ultra high frequency (UHF) band do not apply to analyze mmWave cellular networks directly. Leveraging concepts from stochastic geometry, this paper proposes a general framework to evaluate the coverage and rate performance in mmWave cellular networks. Using a distance-dependent line-of-site (LOS) probability function, the locations of the LOS and non-LOS base stations are modeled as two independent non-homogeneous Poisson point processes, to which different path loss laws are applied. Based on the proposed framework, expressions for the signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio (SINR) and rate coverage probability are derived. The mmWave coverage and rate performance are examined as a function of the antenna geometry and base station density. The case of dense networks is further analyzed by applying a simplified system model, in which the LOS region of a user is approximated as a fixed LOS ball. The results show that dense mmWave networks can achieve comparable coverage and much higher data rates than conventional UHF cellular systems, despite the presence of blockages. The results suggest that the cell size to achieve the optimal SINR scales with the average size of the area that is LOS to a user.