Facilitating Robust 60 GHz Network Deployment By Sensing Ambient Reflectors

60 GHz millimeter-wave networks represent the next frontier in high-speed wireless access technologies. Due to the use of highly directional and electronically steerable beams, the performance of 60 GHz networks becomes a sensitive function of environment structure and reflectivity, which cannot be handled by existing networking paradigms. In this paper, we propose E-Mi, a framework that harnesses 60 GHz radios’ sensing capabilities to boost network performance. E-Mi uses a single pair of 60 GHz transmitter and receiver to sense the environment. It can resolve all dominant reflection paths between the two nodes, from which it reconstructs a coarse outline of major reflectors in the environment. It then feeds the reflector information into a ray-tracer to predict the channel and network performance of arbitrarily located links. Our experiments on a custom-built 60 GHz testbed verify that E-Mi can accurately sense a given environment, and predict the channel quality of different links with 2.8 dB median error. The prediction is then used to optimize the deployment of 60 GHz access points, with 2:2x to 4:5x capacity gain over empirical approaches.