Two beams are better than one: Enabling reliable and high throughput mmWave links

TL;DR

This paper introduces mmReliable, a multi-beam mmWave communication system that significantly improves reliability and throughput by using multi-beamforming and user tracking, demonstrating near-perfect reliability in real-world tests.

Contribution

The paper presents mmReliable, a novel multi-beam mmWave system with optimized beamforming and tracking, achieving high reliability and throughput in challenging environments.

Findings

Achieves near 100% reliability in tests.

Provides 2.3x improvement in throughput-reliability product.

Demonstrates effectiveness on a 28 GHz testbed with real-world experiments.

Abstract

Millimeter-wave communication with high throughput and high reliability is poised to be a gamechanger for V2X and VR applications. However, mmWave links are notorious for low reliability since they suffer from frequent outages due to blockage and user mobility. We build mmReliable, a reliable mmWave system that implements multi-beamforming and user tracking to handle environmental vulnerabilities. It creates constructive multi-beam patterns and optimizes their angle, phase, and amplitude to maximize the signal strength at the receiver. Multi-beam links are reliable since they are resilient to occasional blockages of few constituent beams compared to a single-beam system. We implement mmReliable on a 28 GHz testbed with 400 MHz bandwidth, and a 64 element phased array supporting 5G NR waveforms. Rigorous indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that mmReliable achieves close to 100\% reliability providing 2.3x improvement in the throughput-reliability product than single-beam systems. This is an extended version of a paper published in Sigcomm'21.