Wall-Street: An Intelligent Vehicular Surface for Reliable mmWave Handover

TL;DR

This paper introduces Wall-Street, a vehicle-mounted smart surface that significantly improves mmWave connectivity and handover reliability for high-speed vehicular users by enabling seamless, collective, and preemptive cell transitions.

Contribution

Wall-Street is the first to integrate a vehicle-mounted smart surface for enhancing mmWave handover reliability and mobility management in high-speed scenarios.

Findings

Up to 78% throughput improvement

Up to 34% latency reduction

Seamless handover without data transfer interruption

Abstract

mmWave networks promise high bandwidth but face significant challenges in maintaining reliable connections for users moving at high speed. Frequent handovers, complex beam alignment, and signal blockage from car bodies lead to service interruptions and degraded performance. We present Wall-Street, a vehicle-mounted smart surface that enhances mmWave connectivity for in-vehicle users. Wall-Street improves mobility management by (1) steering outdoor mmWave signals into the vehicle for shared coverage and providing a single, collective handover for all users; (2) performing neighbor-cell search without interrupting data transfer, ensuring seamless handovers; and (3) connecting users to a new cell before disconnecting from the old cell for reliable cell transitions. We implemented and integrated Wall-Street into the COSMOS testbed. We collected PHY traces with multiple base station nodes and in-vehicle user nodes with a surface-mounted vehicle, driving on a nearby road. Our trace-driven ns-3 simulation demonstrates a throughput im- provement of up to 78% and a latency reduction of up to 34% over the standard Standalone handover scheme.