Assessment of Impact of Beamwidth of Directional Antennas on Successful Transmissions in mmWave Adhoc 5G Networks

Abstract

The use of mmWaves for achieving 5G networks is increasingly being seen as a necessity due to the vastly improved bandwidth and data rates at these frequencies. These waves suffer from severe attenuation and their use may, however, be restricted, in the immediate future, to short-range networks, such as personal area networks (IEEE 802.11ad) or vehicular and mobile adhoc networks operating in proximity. MmWaves require directional antennas which have the added advantage of allowing spatial reuse. Even though the high gain in a given direction in such antennas allows us to extend the range, there are several factors, such as error in antenna orientation, fading, blockage which show that an optimum beamwidth can be obtained to maximize the network throughput. The treatment of transmissions, during Line-of-Sight transmission conditions and during Non-Line-of-Sight, is completely different. The paper has evaluated the optimum beamwidth for successful mmWave transmissions in mmWave adhoc networks at 60 Ghz in short-range mmWave networks (IEEE 802.11ad).