Spectrum scarcity and ever increasing densities of wireless network deployments have recently led to an opening of the 60 GHz millimeter-wave bands for unlicensed communication. In contrast to the previously used ISM bands below 5 GHz, a massive amount of 6-9 GHz of bandwidth is available at these frequencies. Usage of these resources is considered for wireless LAN and 5G cellular networks and with the ratification of the IEEE 802.11ad standard in December 2012, wireless LAN is about to bring millimeter-wave communication to the commercial market.

While, wireless networks operating at the 60 GHz band achieve multi-Gb/sec data rates and have a high potential for spacial reuse, the propagation behavior at these frequencies is adverse. Thus, highly directional beam-forming is needed to overcome increased pathloss and avoid attenuation from direct path blockage. Establishing the necessary high gain links is a high overhead procedure, with the search space spanned by the possible combinations of directional transmit and receive antenna sectors that scale with the beam resolution.

In this talk, the implementation and experimental evaluation of a novel wireless transceiver architecture is presented that removes in-band overhead for directional millimeter wave link establishment. The proposed system architecture couples millimeter wave with legacy 2.4/5 GHz bands to exploit the unique propagation properties of each. Omni-directional transmissions at 2.4/5 GHz bands are used to obtain the line-of-sight path using angle of arrival analysis to then establish multi-Gb/sec directional communication in the 60 GHz band. By removing in-band overhead, channel usage for high throughput communication is increased, and scalability to antenna directionality as well as robustness to mobility are provided.
Further, a mechanism is presented that prevents erroneous direction transfer, which can result from diverse propagation characteristics (multi-path propagation) on the omni-directional frequency band or direct path blockage on the directional band. Detection of both adverse effects uses data from the direction finding process, without need for further communication overhead.

About Thomas Nitsche

Thomas Nitsche graduated from Technische Universitaet Muenchen in 2009 with a Diploma degree in Computer Siences. He worked at Nokia Siemens Networks and was research staff member at the Chair for Network Architectures and Services at Technische Universitaet Muenchen until he joined IMDEA Networks in 2012.

His research interests are Wireless Networking; Software Defined Radio; Radiowave Propagation; Wireless PHY-layer; Cross-layer Protocols.

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This event will be conducted in English