Performance Evaluation of Beamforming Solutions for mmWave Wireless Systems

New ultra high data rate systems in the 60 GHz band, especially those targeting high definition video indoor transmission, have a strong requirement for Quality of Service to prevent link outage, and this has to be performed at the MAC level. This paper describes a new simulation platform for these ultra high data rate wireless systems. This new tool models the complete wireless system, including a ray tracing based channel model, smart antennas model, and a physical layer model suitable for MB-OFDM and Single Carrier basebands. In addition, it includes the modeling of RF front-end properties and a MAC layer with beamforming capability for Quality of Service. In this paper we also highlight one use case of this simulation tool as a mean to compare the performance impact of different antenna arrays in a high definition video streaming application.

I. Introduction

As the demand for advances in wireless communication systems is pushing for a new generation of wireless devices with a breakthrough in terms of data rates and quality of service, a new generation of simulation tools is also required to develop these new systems. The Qstream project is a partnership between European wireless experts. Here both, academics and industrial partners, explore and design such next generation wireless indoor systems. In order to provide data rates in the gigabits per second range, the unlicensed 60 GHz band is used. This in turn leads to new challenges, such as preventing communication outage due to the increased pathloss and human blockage of the radio waves. This is the reason why we are investigating a solution based on beamforming and smart antennas. However, improved technologies for high speed baseband signal processing but also digital or analog beamforming are pushing the envelope of current simulation methodologies and tools.