To use millimeter wave bands in future cellular and outdoor wireless networks, understanding the multipath cluster characteristics such as delay and angular spread for different polarization is very important besides knowing the path loss and other large scale propagation parameters. This paper presents result from analysis of wide-band full polarimetric double directional channel measurement at the millimeter wave band in a typical urban pico-cell environment. Only limited number of multipath clusters with gains ranging from -8dB to -26.8dB below the free space path loss and mainly due to single reflection, double reflection and diffraction, under both line of sight (LOS) and obstructed LOS conditions are seen. The cluster gain and scattering intensity showed strong dependence on polarization. The scattering intensities for ϑ-ϑ polarization were seen to be stronger compared to ϕ-ϕ polarization and on average 6.1dB, 5.6dB and 4.5dB higher for clusters due to single reflection, double reflection and scattering respectively. In each cluster, the paths are highly concentrated in the delay domain with delay spread comparable to the delay resolution of 2.5ns irrespective of polarization. Unlike the scattering intensity, the angular spread of paths in each cluster did not show dependence on polarization. On the base station side, average angular spread in azimuth and in elevation were almost similar with ≤3.3° spread in azimuth and ≤3.2° spread in elevation for ϑ-ϑ polarization. These spreads were slightly smaller than those observed for ϕ-ϕ polarization. On the mobile station side the angular spread in azimuth was much higher compared to the base station side. On average, azimuth angular spread of ≤11.4° and elevation angular spread of ≤5° are observed for ϑ-ϑ polarization. These spreads were slightly larger than in ϕ-ϕ polarization. Knowing these characteristics will be vital for more accurate modeling of the channel, and in system and antenna design.

To improve the outage performance of a wireless body area network (BAN), exploitation of the diversity in the channel obtained by letting different nodes cooperate and relay signals for each other is an attractive solution. We carry out multi-link channel measurements and modeling for all realistic locations of the on-body sensor nodes and for three different motion scenarios in a typical office environment to develop equivalent channel model for simple and practical cooperative transmission schemes. Using the developed model the performance of the transmission schemes are evaluated and compared. Incremental decode and forward relaying is found to be consistently better than the other schemes with gains of up to 16dB at 10% outage probability, and an average gain of more than 5.9dB for any location of the coordinator node. The best location of the coordinator node based on the performance is also determined. Such insights will be very useful in designing BANs.