Smart Neighbor Scanning with Directional Antennas in 60 GHz Indoor Networks

The 60 GHz technology has an immense potential to provide wireless communication at multi-gigabit rates. At 60 GHz frequency band, severe attenuation of the signals can significantly degrade communication performance. To cope with the attenuation problem, directional antennas with high directive gains can be utilized. When network nodes use directional antennas, the neighbor discovery process becomes more complicated and time consuming. To reduce the neighbor discovery time, we propose a smart neighbor scanning algorithm in this paper. It is observed that the proposed strategy discovers 70% of the links 81% faster and 90% of the links 15% faster than random scanning strategy

Sector Scanning Attempts for Non-Isolation in Directional 60 GHz Networks

Large path losses of millimeter waves restrain the acceptance of 60 GHz technology in future networks. Directional antennas can be exploited in 60 GHz networks to mitigate the detrimental impact of fading. Employing fully directional antennas complicates the neighbor discovery process where each sector must be probed individually to discover neighbors located in that sector. In random scanning strategy, nodes select to-be-scanned sector randomly. In this letter, we analyze the minimum number of random sector scanning attempts during neighbor discovery process to have a non-isolated network. We present an analytical model to study the isolation probability defined as probability of having at least one isolated node in the network. Based on the isolation probability, we derive the minimum number of sector scanning attempts in a 60 GHz ad hoc network with arbitrary number of nodes. Although 60 GHz directional network is studied, this analysis is applicable to any directional wireless network

Cooperative Communications in Future Home Networks

The basic idea behind cooperative communications is that mobile terminals collaborate to send data to each other. This effectively adds diversity in the system and improves the overall performance. In this paper, we investigate the potential gains of cooperative communication in future home networks. We derive analytical expressions for the error probability of binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signals over Nakagami-m fading channels in a multi relay communication network. Following to the analytical study, we analyze the contribution of cooperative relaying to the 60GHz network connectivity through simulations using a realistic indoor environment model. We compare the performance of different relay configurations under variable obstacle densities. We show that a typical 60GHz indoor network should employ either a multi-relay configuration or a single-relay configuration with a smart relay selection mechanism to achieve acceptable outage rates. In the use of multiple-relay configuration, both analytical and simulation studies indicate that increasing the number of cooperative relays does not improve the system performance significantly after a certain threshold

60 GHz PHY Performance Evaluation with 3D Ray Tracing under Human Shadowing

This work evaluates the system-level performance of 60 GHz channels by simulating a realistic living room scenario with various numbers of humans and three different antenna configurations. In the first step, a comprehensive ray tracing study with a 3D ray tracing tool is performed to determine the channel impulse responses. Feeding our PHY simulator with the collected channel responses, the performance figures are generated over received SNR. It was observed that for a satisfactory BER performance, a directional antenna with the minimum of 10 dB antenna gain should be used at least in the receiver side when there is human shadowing in the environment