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ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Tutorial (Half-Day): Millimeter-Wave Wireless Networking and Sensing |
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The past a few decades have witnessed tremendous penetration of wireless technologies on the microwave spectrum, especially through the WiFi and cellular networks. However, the capacity of such technologies is reaching a limit due to the limited amount of spectrum resource. In contrast, abundant spectrum exists at the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band. For example, around the 60 GHz mmWave band, 14 GHz of unlicensed spectrum is available, spanning 57 GHz to 71 GHz, about an order of magnitude wider than the microwave spectrum in use. This presents an opportunity for profound technological innovations via multi-Gbps indoor and outdoor networks, thus alleviating the capacity crisis facing mobile operators today.
Commercial interest in mmWave networking has been steadily increasing recently, with a main focus on commercializing short-range high-bandwidth mmWave radios based on recent IEEE standards (e.g., 802.11ad and 802.15.3c). However, the transformative potential of mmWave goes well beyond the current standards. The industry alliance has been exploring mmWave as an enabling technology for multi-Gbps cellular connectivity in 5G and beyond. The wide penetration of mobile mmWave radios is also bringing mmWave sensing to everyday life.
The objective of this tutorial is to present to networking researchers an overview of the unique characteristics of mmWave wireless communications, introduce the challenges and latest development in mmWave networking and sensing applications, and outline the future research problems in this domain. The tutorial will be provided by two speakers with complementary expertise in mmWave signal processing, network protocol design, and mmWave sensing applications. The tutorial content draws on insights from state-of-the-art in mmWave networking, as well as the speakers' years of research experience in modeling/measuring mmWave communication systems, and in designing mmWave testbeds, protocols and applications.
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Tutorial slides
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Despite the huge potential in increasing network capacity, mmWave networks face a number of challenges unseen in conventional low-frequency cellular and WiFi systems. mmWave radios commonly adopt many-element phased-array antennas to form highly directional steerable beams, which can leverage reflections to steer around obstacles. These unique characteristics of mmWave technologies require completely rethinking wireless network design from physical-layer signal processing all the way up to mobile applications. On the other hand, the commercialization of mmWave mobile devices is also triggering low-cost mmWave sensing applications, which used to be available only in dedicated environment for medical/security inspection. Together, short wavelength and high directionality translates into high sensitivity, enabling subtle object localization/tracking, vital-sign detection and mobile mmWave imaging. Given the critical role that mmWave will play in next-generation wireless networks and mobile devices, we expect the content to be timely and interesting for the SIGCOMM audience.
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mmWave channel characteristics: models and measurements
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Models of mmWave wireless channel: Emphasis will be put on channel sparsity, directionality, as well as differences from the low-frequency communication channels.
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mmWave channel measurement and estimation: Major insights learned from recent measurements of mmWave network measurements, as well as algorithms to reduce the channel estimation overhead in mmWave systems.
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mmWave communication technologies
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Communication algorithms in mmWave standards: Overview of the modulation, power control, spectrum allocation, along with a contrast to the conventional WiFi systems.
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mmWave beamforming: Structures of phased-arrays and beam patterns, and empirical models of the phased-array capabilities. (iii) mmWave MIMO: High-level model of the mmWave MIMO and hybrid MIMO, under investigation in next-generation mmWave standards (e.g., 802.11ay).
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mmWave MAC protocols
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Medium access control in mmWave network standards. Overview of unique challenges in mmWave MAC, e.g., imperfect directionality, sensitivity to blockage; and standard primitives to address these issues.
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Beam searching protocol: Standard and state-of-the-art solutions to enable efficient beam searching on large phased-array antennas with hundreds of beam patterns.
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Mesh networking through directional mmWave links: Unique aspects of mmWave mesh, with a focus on its unique interference mapping aspects.
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Robust mmWave networking under blockage and mobility
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Overcoming blockage: State-of-the-art solutions that leverage relays, reflectors, or out-of-band channels to sustain the link under human body blockage.
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Making mmWave networks robust using multi-AP cooperation: Leveraging mmWave sensing to help optimizing mmWave access point deployment.
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mmWave sensing systems
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Using mmWave communication devices for object tracking: Millimeter-scale object tracking using 60 GHz directional beams.
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Mobile mmWave imaging: Harnessing mobile mmWave radio devices to estimate the geometries of everyday objects.
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This tutorial will be lecture based, spanning half a day, and delivered by the two speakers in an interleaved manner.
The tutorial will target networking researchers in general. Although certain content involves knowledge in wireless communications, it will be delivered from a high level to facilitate intuitive understanding of the mmWave characteristics. The end goal of the tutorial is to help networking researchers to understand the disruptive aspects of mmWave as the foundation for wireless technologies at 5G and beyond. These aspects are anticipated to trigger the design of new network protocols and applications.