Toward a Seamless Communication Architecture for In-building Networks at the 60 GHz band

This paper addresses the issues of designing an infrastructure to support seamless in-building communication at the 60 GHz band. Recently, the 60 GHz band has received much attention due to its 5 GHz of available spectrum. However, the propagation of signals in this band is strongly hindered by attenuation and line-of-sight requirements. The situation gets worse in the in-building environment where signal propagation is obstructed by physical objects such as walls, furniture etc. In this paper, we present a novel radio over fiber (RoF) architecture that is cost-effective and is able to deliver high data-rate of the order of gigabits. To ensure a seamless communication environment at the 60 GHz band, we propose the concept of extended cells (EC) in order to create sufficient overlap areas. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture by simulating an in-building network at the 60 GHz band employing the RoF and EC concepts

1. Introduction

In recent years, the communication industry has been witnessing enormous growth in the area of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) - in terms of both the number of users and the diversity of services. It is predicted that this will continue at a higher pace in the near future, and it will be driven by a multitude of multimedia applications. As a result, the required capacity of the future wireless networks can be 10 to 100 times as much at the present [9]. To deliver this massive data rate, either the spectrum efficiency must be increased or more spectrum space is required. In the quest for more available bandwidth, much attention has been paid to the 60 GHz band where as much as 5 GHz of spectrum has been allocated worldwide. This unprecedented amount of available spectrum holds the potential for much higher data rate ever compared to other bandwidth-limited channels that are currently used. Wireless data rate in the range of 1 Gbps will be the order of the day. Since the propagation of 60 GHz radio wave (millimeter wave in general) is strongly hindered by attenuation, radio cells are more well-defined and compact making the band very suitable for short-range broadband communications. Moreover, Inter Channel Interference (ICI) is less and thus frequencies can be reused more often in a given smaller geographical area.