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60 GHz indoor WLANs: insights into performance and power consumption

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Abstract

This paper presents a feasibility study of 60 GHz indoor WLANs. We evaluate 60 GHz performance in a typical academic office building under the primary assumption that 60 GHz WLAN APs and clients will be equipped with relatively wide-beam antennas to cope with client mobility. In contrast to previous works which measured performance at a single layer using custom, non-standard compliant hardware, we investigate performance across multiple layers using primarily 802.11ad-compliant wide-beam COTS devices. Our study shows that the large number of reflective surfaces in typical indoor WLAN environments combined with wider beams makes performance highly unpredictable and invalidates several assumptions that hold true in static, narrow-beam, Line-Of-Sight scenarios. Additionally, we present the first measurements, to our best knowledge, of power consumption of an 802.11ad NIC and examine the impact of a number of factors on power consumption.

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Notes

  1. Commercial hardware often does not report PHY data rate and custom hardware [39] does not provide throughput commensurate with 802.11ad rates.

  2. Note that the throughput corresponding to 385 Mbps data rate in Figs. 11e, f is higher (400/450 Mbps) since higher rates were used in the remaining 10% of the time.

  3. We occasionally observed this value to vary between 3.5 and 4 W, e.g., just after re-connection. We believe that this is an energy bug in the chipset that leaves it in a high-power state after certain specific events.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by NSF grant CNS-1553447. Viral Vijay Vira and Anuj Garg completed this work during their MS studies at the University at Buffalo. The contents of this work are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not represent the opinions or views of Amazon LLC or FactSet Research Systems Inc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, 14260-2500, USA

    Swetank Kumar Saha, Darshan Godabanahal Malleshappa, Avinash Palamanda & Dimitrios Koutsonikolas

  2. Amazon LLC, 1915 Terry Avenue, Seattle, WA, 98101, USA

    Viral Vijay Vira

  3. FactSet Research Systems Inc., Merritt 7 Corporate Park, 601 Merritt 7, Norwalk, CT, 06851, USA

    Anuj Garg

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  1. Swetank Kumar Saha
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Correspondence to Swetank Kumar Saha.

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Saha, S.K., Malleshappa, D.G., Palamanda, A. et al. 60 GHz indoor WLANs: insights into performance and power consumption. Wireless Netw 24, 2427–2450 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-017-1475-4

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