On the Design of Gigabit Indoor Wireless LANs at 60 GHz

We consider issues related to the design of a 60GHz short-range wireless local area network (WLAN) using low cost components and aiming at data rates on the order of 1Gbit/s. It is anticipated that the use of adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) in conjunction with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) will be an effective multipath resistant strategy. It is desired to keep the number of sub-carriers low so as to limit the degradation due to practical issues such as phase noise. As the feasibility of this approach depends on the multipath propagation characteristics likely to be encountered, we present a 3D ray tracing approach for obtaining complex-valued channel impulse responses for a target environment consisting of a typical small/medium office or small lab. Using this approach, a number of impulse responses have been obtained via Monte Carlo simulation. These responses were then used in obtaining preliminary predictions of the throughput that could be expected if an AMC-OFDM scheme was to be implemented in the target environment. Albeit under some simplifying assumptions, the results suggest that for a large number of possible transmitter and receiver placements, data rates on the order of a gigabit per second are possible.