Qualitative and Quantitative Comparison of IEEE 802.15.3c and IEEE 802.11ad for Multi-Gbps Local Communications

Both IEEE 802.15.3c and IEEE 802.11ad standards define physical and medium access control layers for operation in the 60 GHz millimeter wave frequency band that is capable of multi-Gbps throughput. As both standards are used for multi-Gbps local communications, we would like to know which one is better for a given set of application domain requirements. In this paper, we compare the two standards qualitatively and quantitatively, focusing on multi-Gbps local communications. According to the quantitative performance analysis, both IEEE 802.15.3c and IEEE 802.11ad have almost the same performance in terms of throughput and delay. The qualitative comparison, however, shows that IEEE 802.11ad is more robust than IEEE 802.15.3c because the former has additional features of coexistence and backward compatibility.