Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 2, number 1, 2009 // View article

Multi-band Gigabit Mesh Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

Authors:
L. Lily Yang
Minyoung Park

Keywords: mmWave, 60GHz, Multi-band, Multi-channel, Mesh Networks, Gbps Wireless Networks, IEEE 802.11ad, IEEE 802.11VHT

Abstract:
60 GHz has attracted a lot of commercial interest due to its abundance of unlicensed frequency spectrum and the recent advances in building inexpensive transceivers. IEEE 802.11 has started a new Task Group, 802.11ad, to develop a 60 GHz PHY and MAC that can deliver at least 1Gbps MAC throughput. The 802.11ad amendment is also required to enable seamless session switch between the existing 2.4/5 GHz and the new 60 GHz radio. This paper proposes the system concept of multi-band gigabit mesh networks that can potentially satisfy the requirements set out in 802.11ad. The benefits of multi-band gigabit mesh networks are presented, including the diversity gain, range extension and spatial reuse gain. In particular, a 2-hop 60 GHz mesh is simulated for an office WLAN example to demonstrate that the spatial reuse gain can be very significant in 60 GHz mesh networks thanks to the nature of the highly directional beamformed links. Such high degree of spatial reuse can significantly improve the end to end network throughput of a multi-hop mesh network while providing reasonable range. The key challenges for the multi-band gigabit mesh are also discussed along with some open research questions for future work.

Pages: 88 to 99

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 7, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644