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 2.2× to 4.5× capacity gain over empirical approaches.