Towards Scalable and Ubiquitous Millimeter-Wave Wireless Networks

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology is emerging as the most promising solution to meet the multi-fold demand increase for mobile data. Very short wavelength, high directionality, together with sensitivity to rampant blockages and mobility, however, render state-of-the-art mmWave technologies unsuitable for ubiquitous wireless coverage. In this work, we design and implement UbiG - a mmWave wireless access network - that can deliver ubiquitous gigabits per second wireless access consistently to the commercial-off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11ad devices. UbiG has two key design components: (1) a fast probing based beam alignment algorithm that can identify the best beam consistently with guaranteed latency in a mmWave link, and the algorithm scales well even with a very large number of beams; and (2) an infrastructure-side predictive ranking based fast access point switching algorithm to ensure seamless gigabits per second connectivity under mobility and blockage in a dense mmWave deployment. Our IEEE 802.11ad testbed experiments show that UbiG performs close to an "Oracle" solution that instantaneously knows the best beam and access point for gigabits per second data transmission to users.

[1]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  Spatial and temporal characteristics of 60-GHz indoor channels , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[2]  Iouliia Skliarova,et al.  FPGA-Based Implementation of Genetic Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem and Its Industrial Application , 2002, IEA/AIE.

[3]  L. Watson,et al.  Genetic Algorithm for Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming Problems Using Separate Constraint Approximations , 2003 .

[4]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  In-building wideband partition loss measurements at 2.5 and 60 GHz , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[5]  Eero P. Simoncelli,et al.  Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[6]  Mike Y. Chen,et al.  Improved access point selection , 2006, MobiSys '06.

[7]  Peter F. M. Smulders,et al.  Statistical Characterization of 60-GHz Indoor Radio Channels , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

[8]  Jing Gao,et al.  Beamforming Codebook Design and Performance Evaluation for 60GHz Wideband WPANs , 2009, 2009 IEEE 70th Vehicular Technology Conference Fall.

[9]  Minyoung Park,et al.  Analysis on spatial reuse and interference in 60-GHz wireless networks , 2009, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[10]  R. Hansen.  Phased Array Antennas , 2009 .

[11]  Ioannis Papaefstathiou,et al.  High-speed FPGA-based implementations of a Genetic Algorithm , 2009, 2009 International Symposium on Systems, Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation.

[12]  A. Maltsev,et al.  Statistical channel model for 60 GHz WLAN systems in conference room environment , 2010, Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Antennas and Propagation.

[13]  Lie Wang,et al.  Orthogonal Matching Pursuit for Sparse Signal Recovery With Noise , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[14]  Paramvir Bahl,et al.  Augmenting data center networks with multi-gigabit wireless links , 2011, SIGCOMM.

[15]  Carsten Griwodz,et al.  Mobile video streaming using location-based network prediction and transparent handover , 2011, NOSSDAV.

[16]  Upamanyu Madhow,et al.  Compressive adaptation of large steerable arrays , 2012, 2012 Information Theory and Applications Workshop.

[17]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  Mirror mirror on the ceiling: flexible wireless links for data centers , 2012, SIGCOMM.

[18]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  38 GHz and 60 GHz angle-dependent propagation for cellular & peer-to-peer wireless communications , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[19]  Upamanyu Madhow,et al.  Compressive tracking with 1000-element arrays: A framework for multi-Gbps mm wave cellular downlinks , 2012, 2012 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton).

[20]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will Work! , 2013, IEEE Access.

[21]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  Broadband Millimeter-Wave Propagation Measurements and Models Using Adaptive-Beam Antennas for Outdoor Urban Cellular Communications , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

[22]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications , 2014 .

[23]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  Demystifying 60GHz outdoor picocells , 2014, MobiCom.

[24]  Malolan Chetlur,et al.  Location assisted handoffs in dense cellular networks , 2014, 2014 Eleventh Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON).

[25]  Jörg Widmer,et al.  Steering with eyes closed: Mm-Wave beam steering without in-band measurement , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM).

[26]  Parameswaran Ramanathan,et al.  60 GHz Indoor Networking through Flexible Beams: A Link-Level Profiling , 2015, SIGMETRICS 2015.

[27]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  3-D statistical channel model for millimeter-wave outdoor mobile broadband communications , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[28]  Parameswaran Ramanathan,et al.  BeamSpy: Enabling Robust 60 GHz Links Under Blockage , 2016, NSDI.

[29]  Parameswaran Ramanathan,et al.  OpenMili: a 60 GHz software radio platform with a reconfigurable phased-array antenna , 2016, MobiCom.

[30]  Upamanyu Madhow,et al.  Compressive Channel Estimation and Tracking for Large Arrays in mm-Wave Picocells , 2015, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.

[31]  Parameswaran Ramanathan,et al.  OpenMili: a 60 GHz software radio with a programmable phased-array antenna: demo , 2016, MobiCom.

[32]  Omid Salehi-Abari,et al.  Cutting the Cord in Virtual Reality , 2016, HotNets.

[33]  Omid Salehi-Abari,et al.  Millimeter Wave Communications: From Point-to-Point Links to Agile Network Connections , 2016, HotNets.

[34]  Prasant Mohapatra,et al.  MU-MIMO-Aware AP Selection for 802.11ac Networks , 2017, MobiHoc.

[35]  Jörg Widmer,et al.  Zero Overhead Device Tracking in 60 GHz Wireless Networks using Multi-Lobe Beam Patterns , 2017, CoNEXT.

[36]  Longfei Shangguan,et al.  Wi-Fi Goes to Town: Rapid Picocell Switching for Wireless Transit Networks , 2017, SIGCOMM Posters and Demos.

[37]  Kyu-Han Kim,et al.  WiFi-Assisted 60 GHz Wireless Networks , 2017, MobiCom.

[38]  Longfei Shangguan,et al.  Wi-Fi Goes to Town: Rapid Picocell Switching for Wireless Transit Networks , 2017, SIGCOMM.

[39]  Xinyu Zhang,et al.  Pose Information Assisted 60 GHz Networks: Towards Seamless Coverage and Mobility Support , 2017, MobiCom.

[40]  Upamanyu Madhow,et al.  Noncoherent mmWave Path Tracking , 2017, HotMobile.

[41]  Lujain Dabouba,et al.  Millimeter Wave Mobile Communication for 5 G Cellular , 2017 .

[42]  Jörg Widmer,et al.  Compressive Millimeter-Wave Sector Selection in Off-the-Shelf IEEE 802.11ad Devices , 2017, CoNEXT.

[43]  Injong Rhee,et al.  CUBIC for Fast Long-Distance Networks , 2018, RFC.

[44]  Piotr Indyk,et al.  Fast millimeter wave beam alignment , 2018, SIGCOMM.