Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communication Systems: Theory and Applications

Recently, millimeter-wave radio has attracted a great deal of interest from academia, industry, and global standardization bodies due to a number of attractive features of millimeter-wave to provide multi-gigabit transmission rate. This enables many new applications such as high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) cable replacement for uncompressed video or audio streaming and multi-gigabit file transferring, all of which intended to provide better quality and user experience. Despite of unique capability of millimeter-wave technology to offer such a high data rate demand, a number of technical challenges need to be overcome or well understood before its full deployment. This special issue is aimed to provide a more thorough understanding of millimeter-wave technology and can be divided into three parts. The first part presents the recent status and development of millimeter-wave technology and the second part discusses various types of propagation channel models. Finally, the last part of this special issue presents some technical challenges with respect to suitable millimeter-wave air interface and highlights some related implementation issues. In the first paper by S.-K. Yong and C.-C. Chong, the authors provide a generic overview of the current status of the millimeter wave radio technology. In particular, the potential and limitations of this new technology in order to support the multi-gigabit wireless application are discussed. The authors envisioned that the 60 GHz radio will be one of the important candidates for the next generation wireless systems. This paper also included a link budget study that highlights the crucial role of antennas in establishing a reliable communication link. The second paper by N. Guo et al. extends the overview discussion of the first paper by summarizing some recent works in the area of 60 GHz radio system design. Some new simulation results are being reported which shown the impact of the phase noise on the bit-error rate (BER). The authors concluded that phase noise is a very important factor when considering multi-gigabit wireless transmission and has to be taken into account seriously. In the third paper by C.-P. Lim et al. the authors propose a 60 GHz indoor propagation channel model based on the ray-tracing method. The model is validated with measurements conducted in indoor environment. Important parameters such as root mean square (RMS) delay spread and the fading statistics in order to characterize the behavior of the millimeter-wave multipath propagation channel are extracted from the measurement database. This ray-tracing model is particularly important …