Two beams are better than one: Enabling reliable and high throughput mmWave links
Abstract
Millimeter-wave communication with high throughput and high reliability is poised to be a gamechanger for V2X and VR applications. However, mmWave links are notorious for low reliability since they suffer from frequent outages due to blockage and user mobility. We build mmReliable, a reliable mmWave system that implements multi-beamforming and user tracking to handle environmental vulnerabilities. It creates constructive multi-beam patterns and optimizes their angle, phase, and amplitude to maximize the signal strength at the receiver. Multi-beam links are reliable since they are resilient to occasional blockages of few constituent beams compared to a single-beam system. We implement mmReliable on a 28 GHz testbed with 400 MHz bandwidth, and a 64 element phased array supporting 5G NR waveforms. Rigorous indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that mmReliable achieves close to 100\% reliability providing 2.3x improvement in the throughput-reliability product than single-beam systems. This is an extended version of a paper published in Sigcomm'21.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2101.04249,
title = {Two beams are better than one: Enabling reliable and high throughput mmWave links},
author = {Ish Kumar Jain and Raghav Subbaraman and Dinesh Bharadia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.04249},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
17 pages, 19 figures. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference. 2021