The use of directional antennas in millimeter-wave communication promises high spatial reuse at multi-gigabit-per second data rates in dense wireless networks. Existing work studies such networks using commercial hardware but is limited to individual links. Moreover, such hardware typically allows for little or no control of the lower layers of the protocol stack. In this paper, we study the performance of dense millimeter-wave deployments featuring up to eight stations. To this end, we use a practical IEEE 802.11ad millimeter-wave testbed that allows access to the lower layer parameters of each station. This enables us to analyze the impact of these parameters on upper layer performance. We study, for first time to our best knowledge, issues such as the impact of channel contention on the buffer size at the transport layer, the effect of frame aggregation, and the efficiency of spatial sharing. Our results show that using large buffer sizes with TCP is harmful due to channel contention despite the multi-gigabit-per-second data rates. Further, frame aggregation is only beneficial up to a certain level due to higher error rates for large frames. Finally, we also study delay, showing that the regular beacon transmission time can degrade performance.

About Hany Assasa

I am a fourth year PhD student at IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid. In my PhD, I focus on building efficient, robust, and reliable millimeter-wave wireless networks. Recently, I spent 5 months at NEC Laboratories Europe, Heidelberg, Germany where I worked in the 5G group on the topic of multi-RAT mmWave access. Before joining IMDEA Networks, I did a double degree master in Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). During my master studies, I worked as a researcher in Ericsson (Sweden) within the cloud core and architecture team. I graduated from Damascus University (Syria) on 2010 with a bachelor degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering. After that I worked for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., as a Core Network Packet Switch Engineer from 2010 to 2012.

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