Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology has been advocated as a promising infrastructure to provide reliable communications, both in indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, we extend the application of mmWave to the uplink communication between smart meters (SMs) and a gateway. Such a communication is subject to interference from SMs belonging to adjacent networks and blockage caused by human bodies, for instance. Using a three- dimension (3D) stochastic blockage model, we derive the outage probability. Accounting for human-body blockage, the high-signal to noise ratio (SNR) analysis shows a diversity gain of (m N M), where m N is the Nakagami-fading parameter of the non line of sight (NLOS) of the reference transmitter's channel and ℳ is the number of receive antennas at the gateway. Our analysis shows that the probability that an SM is in LOS decays exponentially with the link length and the density of blockages. Although at high SNR, blockage reduces the diversity gain, our numerical results show that blockage may improve the coverage probability at finite SNR.
