Design exploration for millimeter-wave short-range industrial wireless communications

This work proposes models and a link design method to exploit the potentiality of millimeter waves (mmW) as physical layer of industrial networking protocols. This work shows that, even taking into account harsh operating conditions, a transmitted power of 10 dBm allows for reliable connections at a distance of tens of meters. With respect to traditional sub-3 GHz wireless connections used in indoor industrial environments, mmW links feature worldwide-unlicensed ISM (Industrial Scientific Medical) wideband. This can be exploited to implement frequency-hopping and frequency-diversity techniques to increase link robustness. Operating at mmW allows for inherent interference separation from operating frequencies of electrical machine, power switching converters and other wireless connections. Implementation results of key hardware building blocks with CMOS and PCB technologies prove the feasibility of mmW nodes with low-power and low size.