Synthesizing Omnidirectional Antenna Patterns, Received Power and Path Loss from Directional Antennas for 5G Millimeter-Wave Communications

Omnidirectional path loss models are vital for radio-system design in wireless communication systems, as they allow engineers to perform network simulations for systems with arbitrary antenna patterns. At millimeter-wave frequencies, channel measurements are frequently conducted using steerable high-gain directional antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to make up for the significant increase in free space path loss at these frequencies compared to traditional cellular systems that operate at lower frequencies. The omnidirectional antenna pattern, and resulting omnidirectional received power must therefore be synthesized from many unique pointing angles, where the transmit and receive antennas are rotated over many different azimuth and elevation planes. In this paper, the equivalent omnidirectional antenna pattern and omnidirectional received power are synthesized by summing the received powers from all measured unique pointing angles obtained at antenna half-power beamwidth step increments in the azimuth and elevation planes, and this method is validated by demonstrating that the synthesized omnidirectional received power and path loss are independent of antenna beamwidth, through theoretical analyses and millimeter-wave propagation measurements using antennas with different beamwidths. The method in this paper is shown to provide accurate results while enhancing the measurement range substantially through the use of directional antennas.