A Feasibility Study of 60 GHz Indoor WLANs

Abstract

This paper presents a feasibility study of 60 GHz indoor WLANs. We evaluate 60 GHz performance in a typical academic office building under the primary assumption that 60 GHz WLAN APs and clients will be equipped with wider beam antennas to cope with client mobility. In contrast to previous works which measured performance at a single layer using custom, non-standard compliant hardware, we investigate performance across multiple layers using 802.11ad-compliant wide beam COTS devices. Our study shows that the large number of reflective surfaces in typical indoor WLAN environments combined with wider beams makes performance highly unpredictable and invalidates several assumptions that hold true in static, LOS scenarios. Additionally, we present the first measurements, to our best knowledge, of power consumption of an 802.11ad NIC and examine the impact of a number of factors on power consumption.