Measurement Method of Temporal Attenuation by Human Body in Off‐the‐Shelf 60 GHz WLAN with HMM‐Based Transmission State Estimation

This paper discusses a measurement method of time‐variant attenuation of IEEE 802.11ad wireless LAN signals in the 60 GHz band induced by human blockage. The IEEE 802.11ad access point (AP) transmits frames intermittently, not continuously. Thus, to obtain the time‐varying signal attenuation, it is required to estimate the duration in which the AP transmitted signals. To estimate whether the AP transmitted signals or not at each sampling point, this paper applies a simple two‐state hidden Markov model. In addition, the validity of the model is tested based on Bayesian information criterion in order to prevent model overfitting and consequent invalid results. The measurement method is validated in that the distribution of the time duration in which the signal attenuates by 5 dB is consistent with the existing statistical model and the range of the measured time duration in which the signal attenuation decreases from 5 dB to 0 dB is similar to that in the previous report.