Abstract
To meet the growing demand for wireless capacity, communications in the Terahertz (THz) and optical bands are being broadly explored. Communications within these bands provide massive bandwidth potential along with highly directional beam steering capabilities. While the available bandwidth offers incredible link capacity, the directionality of these technologies offers an even more significant potential for spatial capacity or area spectral efficiency. However, this directionality also implies a challenge related to the network’s ability to quickly establish a connection. In this paper, we introduce a multi-tier heterogeneous (MTH) beamform management strategy that utilizes various wireless technologies in order to quickly acquire a highly directional indoor free space optical communication (FSO) link. The multi-tier design offers the high resolution of indoor FSO while the millimeter-wave (mmWave) system narrows the FSO search space. By narrowing the search space, the system relaxes the requirements of the FSO network in order to assure a practical search time. This paper introduces the necessary components of the proposed beam management strategy and provides a foundational analysis framework to demonstrate the relative impact of coverage, resolution, and steering velocity across tiers. Furthermore, an optimization analysis is used to define the top tier resolution that minimizes worst-case search time as a function of lower tier resolution and top tier range.
Highlights
The continuous growth in demand for wireless capacity projects the use of spectrum into the sub-mm, Terahertz (THz), and optical bands
We introduce a multi-tier heterogeneous beam management strategy that reconciles the nature of highly directional indoor free space optical communications (FSO) links and the dynamic beam management needed to maximize network performance for multiple mobile users
We propose a multi-tier heterogeneous (MTH) beam management strategy that benefits from the resolution and steering velocity of various component technologies (Figure 1)
Summary
The continuous growth in demand for wireless capacity projects the use of spectrum into the sub-mm, Terahertz (THz), and optical bands. Exploiting narrow optical beams for local end-user wireless access can provide data densities and user-experienced data rates that far surpass 5G specifications This is technically feasible based on the demonstrated potential of steered beams and the inherent signal density of focused light [6,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]; many research challenges exist at the network and system levels. Indoor optical wireless communications technologies (e.g., visible light communications or LiFi) are beginning to see commercial acceptance; these systems are typically static emission systems without beam steering due to lighting requirements in the common dual-use paradigm (i.e., systems that provide both data communications and indoor illumination) These systems do not approach the extreme directionality of pencil-beam FSO links. Work in the area of heterogeneous radio and optical wireless networks has introduced the idea of mobility aware or context aware resource allocation [26,34,35]; this has typically applied to the distribution of traffic across static RF small cells and static directional optical cells
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