Reliable 60 GHz WLANs through Coordination: Measurement, Modeling and Optimization

Goals: The objective of this project is to investigate a new class of proactive blockage mitigation techniques based on coordination that can lead to reliable 60 GHz WLAN design. The techniques are based on multiple access points jointly transmitting to client devices. With careful selection of access points and their paths, the spatial diversity and separation in angle of arrivals provide adequate robustness against blockages. The proposed research will use measurements, modeling and optimization techniques to effectively utilize joint transmissions in 60 GHz WLANs.

Tasks: First, measurement-driven multi-state performance degradation models will be developed to capture the impact of blockages on link performance. The models will be used to design reliability metrics for joint transmissions and to identify their interference relationships.

Second, based on the measurement-driven models, a joint access point selection and link scheduling problem will be studied to maximize network throughput in presence of reliability and spatial reuse trade-off introduced by joint transmissions. The optimization problem will be extended to include time and space-correlated 60 GHz links.

Third, the proactive nature of joint transmissions can substantially reduce link layer delay. This property will be characterized using 360-degree live video streaming over 60 GHz links and delay sensitive scheduling strategies with joint transmissions will be investigated. The measurements, implementation and evaluation will be performed using 60 GHz off-the-shelf devices and software-radio testbed.

STUDENTS

Yoon Chae PhD, CS, GMU
Ding Zhang PhD, CS, GMU

FACULTY

Parth Pathak, Assistant Professor, CS, GMU
Zizhan Zheng, Assistant Professor, CS, Tulane University

PUBLICATIONS

Characterizing Interference Mitigation Techniques in Dense 60 GHz mmWave WLANs [PDF],
Ding Zhang, Panneer Selvam Santhalingam, Parth Pathak and Zizhan Zheng,
IEEE ICCCN 2019.
mmChoir: Exploiting Joint Transmissions for Reliable 60GHz mmWave WLANs [PDF],
Ding Zhang, Mihir Garude and Parth H. Pathak,
ACM MobiHoc 2018.

SUPPORT

The project is funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) NeTS grant award (CNS-1815945).