WiFi Assisted Multi-WiGig AP Coordination for Future Multi-Gbps WLANs

TL;DR

This paper proposes a WiFi-assisted coordination architecture for WiGig APs in 60 GHz WLANs, enhancing throughput and reducing interference through WiFi-based signaling and location-aware beamforming.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture that tightly integrates WiFi and WiGig bands for coordinated AP management and a location-based beamforming mechanism using WiFi fingerprinting.

Findings

Significant throughput improvement over uncoordinated WiGig WLANs

Reduced packet delay and dropping rate with the proposed coordination

Effective interference mitigation through location-aware beamforming

Abstract

Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) access points (APs) using 60 GHz unlicensed frequency band are considered as key enablers for future Gbps wireless local area networks (WLANs). Exhaustive search analog beamforming (BF) is mainly used with WiGig transmissions to overcome channel propagation loss and accomplish high rate data transmissions. Due to its short range transmission with high susceptibility to path blocking, a multiple number of WiGig APs should be installed to fully cover a typical target environment. Therefore, coordination among the installed APs is highly needed for enabling WiGig concurrent transmissions while overcoming packet collisions and reducing interference, which highly increases the total throughput of WiGig WLANs. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive architecture for coordinated WiGig WLANs. The proposed WiGig WLAN is based on a tight coordination between the 5 GHz (WiFi) and the 60 GHz (WiGig) unlicensed frequency bands. By which, the wide coverage WiFi band is used to do the signaling required for organizing WiGig concurrent data transmissions using control/user (C/U) plane splitting. To reduce interference to existing WiGig data links while doing BF, a novel location based BF mechanism is also proposed based on WiFi fingerprinting. The proposed coordinated WiGig WLAN highly outperforms conventional un-coordinated one in terms of total throughput, average packet delay and packet dropping rate.