Practical lower layer 60 GHz measurements using commercial off-the-shelf hardware

Abstract

Experimenting platforms for wireless 60 GHz networking measurements are limited and extremely costly. The requirements for such a platform in terms of bandwidth and antenna capabilities are very high. For instance, the 802.11ad protocol uses channels with a bandwidth of 2.16 GHz and requires electronically steerable phased antenna arrays. Devices implementing this protocol are available as consumer-grade off-the-shelf hardware but are typically a black box which barely allows any insights for research purposes. In this paper, we show the hidden monitoring capabilities of such a consumer-grade 60 GHz device, and explain how to access lower layer parameters such as modulation and coding schemes, antenna steering, and packet decoding. Moreover, we present an extensive set of experiments showing the behavior of these parameters by means of the aforementioned monitoring capabilities.