Introduction The constant increase in the users’ bitrate demands has made that telecom operators provide fast and economical broadband to home and business users. Due to its lower cost compared to fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments and quicker time to market, fixed wireless access (FWA) is a viable alternative to fiber for providing the necessary connection with enormous growth prospects for operators. Wider bandwidths provided by mmWave frequencies, are considered by FWA in order to enable more than 1 Gbps in the access network. The IEEE 802.11ay specification, defines that the 60 GHz band can achieve such bandwidths with technologies that include Multi-user MIMO (MuMIMO) serving bitrates up to 40 Gbps and transmission lengths up to 500 m. However, this short distance makes unfeasible a backhaul made of fiber. Thus, wireless backhaul links must be used to support serving nodes. Locating the serving nodes (Edge Nodes -EN) and the user nodes (Customer Premises Equipment - CPE) is a challenge than involves several items from the technology and propagation point of view. A typical FWA network architecture is presented in Fig. 1. Fig. 1: FWA Network architecture Methods To evaluate the performance of the FWA network, a Java-based network planner is created. It includes a multi-objective graph solver algorithm to provide connectivity to user houses on the 60 GHz band. Channel modelling The path loss model is based on measurements on the 60 GHz band. • Path Loss due propagation: • Reflection losses • Rain losses • Vegetation losses Use cases Two main use case Rural (Leest) and Urban (Liege) Algorithm Main Results Fig. 2: Network planning examples for Rural and Urban environments 60 GHZ NETWORK PLANNING FOR FIXED WIRELESS ACCESS DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY – WAVES RESEARCH GROUP German Castellanos Contact German.castellanos@UGent.be www.waves.intec.ugent.be Research objective Design a Network Planner algorithm to serve home users with Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network under environmental constrains in the 60GHz band Universiteit Gent @ugent Ghent University Planner Initialization (Input config and Scenarios) CPE generation (Bitrate and Location) EN generation (Tree Pruning ) Graph Network Generation Node Creation - Path Loss Calculations Solver Configuration Define optimization Objectives and Constrains SOLVE Mixed-Integer Programming Assign Solved Solution to ENs and CPEs Calculate metrics & print results Simulation Finished 1 2 3 4 5 6 Coverage • Achieves >97% in Urban while Rural >90%. • Lamp post usage is essential. Edge node usage • Urban uses 4x more nodes/km2 than Rural. • Urban serves less CPE/EDGE (~0.8) compared to Rural (~1.0). ➔Depends on CPE density. Link distance • Mesh distance is constant in all scenarios. • CPE distance is 25% larger in Rural Served Capacity per Edge Node • In urban (300-500Mbps) is 2/3 of the Rural Scenario • Supported capacity is superior of 4Gbps in Urban and 3Gbps in rural. Vegetation • Rural reduces Coverage by ~3%. Then, Edge node usage increases by ~7%. • No impact in user coverage in Urban due to vegetation. But ~4% increment on the Edge Node used. Heavy Rain • In Rural, reduces Coverage by ~5% or increases Edge Node usage by ~15%. • Heavy rain slightly affects user coverage, but the required Edge nodes increase by ~5% in Urban.