Enabling Seamless Coverage and Mobility Support for 60 GHz Networks Using Pose Information

Abstract

60 GHz millimeter-wave networking has emerged as the next frontier technology to provide multi-Gbps wireless connectivity. Recently proposed mmWave network standards, like 802.11ad, have spawned a new wave of applications such as wireless virtual reality and uncompressed miracast. However, due to ultra-high carrier frequency, the 60 GHz radios are extremely vulnerable to propagation loss and obstacle blockage. To combat the intrinsic signal attenuation, the use of highly directional phased-array antennas, with limited Field-of-view (FoV), makes the mmWave links extremely sensitive to user mobility and orientation change. Hence, achieving stable 60 GHz connectivity, even at room-level, becomes a nontrivial task. My research has been focusing on a series of techniques to address these challenges. These techniques leverage extraneous sensing information to facilitate the mmWave protocols, so as to provide room-scale coverage at multi-Gbps bit-rate. In this talk, I will first outline the impact of limited FoV of the 60 GHz radio under mobility, and then present a robust 60 GHz network architecture, in which multiple cooperating APs can complement others' blind spots and together form seamless coverage. I will then describe two design components: pose-assisted link predictor and pose-assisted spatial sharing. They leverage the pose information from mobile devices, and improve the 60 GHz network robustness under mobility through intelligent AP switching and beam selection. Finally, to account for the impact of reflections from close-by objects, I will introduce an environment sensing method, which fuses the pose information with the link quality measurement, to computationally discriminate the refection paths and model their impacts separately.