Millimeter-wave Wireless LAN and its Extension toward 5G Heterogeneous Networks

Millimeter-wave (mmw) frequency bands, especially 60 GHz unlicensed band, are considered as a promising solution for gigabit short range wireless communication systems. IEEE standard 802.11ad, also known as WiGig, is standardized for the usage of the 60 GHz unlicensed band for wireless local area networks (WLANs). By using this mmw WLAN, multi-Gbps rate can be achieved to support bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications. Exhaustive search along with beamforming (BF) is usually used to overcome 60 GHz channel propagation loss and accomplish data transmissions in such mmw WLANs. Because of its short range transmission with a high susceptibility to path blocking, multiple number of mmw access points (APs) should be used to fully cover a typical target environment for future high capacity multi-Gbps WLANs. Therefore, coordination among mmw APs is highly needed to overcome packet collisions resulting from un-coordinated exhaustive search BF and to increase the total capacity of mmw WLANs. In this paper, we firstly give the current status of mmw WLANs with our developed WiGig AP prototype. Then, we highlight the great need for coordinated transmissions among mmw APs as a key enabler for future high capacity mmw WLANs. Two different types of coordinated mmw WLAN architecture are introduced. One is the distributed antenna type architecture to realize centralized coordination, while the other is an autonomous coordination with the assistance of legacy Wi-Fi signaling. Moreover, two heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures are also introduced to efficiently extend the coordinated mmw WLANs to be used for future 5th Generation (5G) cellular networks.Comment: 18 pages, 24 figures, accepted, invited paper

Multi-layer Utilization of Beamforming in Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems

mmWave frequencies ranging between (30-300GHz) have been considered the perfect solution to the scarcity of bandwidth in the traditional sub-6GHz band and to the ever increasing demand of many emerging applications in today\u27s era. 5G and beyond standards are all considering the mmWave as an essential part of there networks. Beamforming is one of the most important enabling technologies for the mmWave to compensate for the huge propagation lose of these frequencies compared to the sub-6GHz frequencies and to ensure better spatial and spectral utilization of the mmWave channel space. In this work, we tried to develop different techniques to improve the performance of the systems that use mmWave. In the physical layer, we suggested several hybrid beamforming architectures that both are relatively simple and spectrally efficient by achieving fully digital like spectral efficiency (bits/sec/Hz). For the mobility management, we derived the expected degradation that can affect the performance of a special type of beamforming that is called the Random Beamforming (RBF) and optimized the tunable parameters for such systems when working in different environments. Finally, in the networking layer, we first studied the effect of using mmWave frequencies on the routing performance comparing to the performance achieved when using sub-6 GHz frequencies. Then we developed a novel opportunistic routing protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET) that uses a modified version of the Random Beamforming (RBF) to achieve better end to end performance and to reduce the overall delay in delivering data from transmitting nodes to the intended receiving nodes. From all these designs and studies, we conclude that mmWave frequencies and their enabling technologies (i.e. Beamforming, massive MIMO, ...etc.) are indeed the future of wireless communicatons in a high demanding world of Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and self driving cars

Millimetre wave frequency band as a candidate spectrum for 5G network architecture : a survey

In order to meet the huge growth in global mobile data traffic in 2020 and beyond, the development of the 5th Generation (5G) system is required as the current 4G system is expected to fall short of the provision needed for such growth. 5G is anticipated to use a higher carrier frequency in the millimetre wave (mm-wave) band, within the 20 to 90 GHz, due to the availability of a vast amount of unexploited bandwidth. It is a revolutionary step to use these bands because of their different propagation characteristics, severe atmospheric attenuation, and hardware constraints. In this paper, we carry out a survey of 5G research contributions and proposed design architectures based on mm-wave communications. We present and discuss the use of mm-wave as indoor and outdoor mobile access, as a wireless backhaul solution, and as a key enabler for higher order sectorisation. Wireless standards such as IEE802.11ad, which are operating in mm-wave band have been presented. These standards have been designed for short range, ultra high data throughput systems in the 60 GHz band. Furthermore, this survey provides new insights regarding relevant and open issues in adopting mm-wave for 5G networks. This includes increased handoff rate and interference in Ultra-Dense Network (UDN), waveform consideration with higher spectral efficiency, and supporting spatial multiplexing in mm-wave line of sight. This survey also introduces a distributed base station architecture in mm-wave as an approach to address increased handoff rate in UDN, and to provide an alternative way for network densification in a time and cost effective manner

Hybrid beamforming in mm-wave MIMO systems having a finite input alphabet

Recently, there has been significant research effort toward achieving high data rates in the millimeter wave bands by employing large antenna systems. These systems are considered to have only a fraction of the RF chains compared with the total number of antennas and employ analog phase shifters to steer the transmit and receive beams in addition to the conventional beamforming (BF)/combining invoked in the baseband domain. This scheme, which is popularly known as hybrid BF, has been extensively studied in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, all the existing schemes focus on obtaining the BF/combining matrices that maximize the system capacity computed using a Gaussian input alphabet. However, this choice of matrices may be suboptimal for practical systems, since they employ a finite input alphabet, such as quadrature amplitude modulation/phase-shift keying constellations. Hence, in this paper, we consider a hybrid BF/combining system operating with a finite input alphabet and optimize the analog as well as digital BF/combining matrices by maximizing the mutual information (MI). This is achieved by an iterative gradient ascent algorithm that exploits the relationship between the minimum mean-squared error and the MI. Furthermore, an iterative algorithm is proposed for designing a codebook for the analog and digital BF/combining matrices based on a vector quantization approach. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed gradient ascent algorithm achieves an ergodic rate improvement of up to 0.4 bits per channel use (bpcu) compared with the Gaussian input scenario. Furthermore, the gain in the ergodic rate achieved by employing the vector quantization-based codebook is about 0.5 bpcu compared with the Gaussian input scenari

Frame Structure Design and Analysis for Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems

The millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies have attracted considerable attention for fifth generation (5G) cellular communication as they offer orders of magnitude greater bandwidth than current cellular systems. However, the medium access control (MAC) layer may need to be significantly redesigned to support the highly directional transmissions, ultra-low latencies and high peak rates expected in mmWave communication. To address these challenges, we present a novel mmWave MAC layer frame structure with a number of enhancements including flexible, highly granular transmission times, dynamic control signal locations, extended messaging and ability to efficiently multiplex directional control signals. Analytic formulae are derived for the utilization and control overhead as a function of control periodicity, number of users, traffic statistics, signal-to-noise ratio and antenna gains. Importantly, the analysis can incorporate various front-end MIMO capability assumptions -- a critical feature of mmWave. Under realistic system and traffic assumptions, the analysis reveals that the proposed flexible frame structure design offers significant benefits over designs with fixed frame structures similar to current 4G long-term evolution (LTE). It is also shown that fully digital beamforming architectures offer significantly lower overhead compared to analog and hybrid beamforming under equivalent power budgets.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions for Wireless Communication