NeTS: Small: Enabling Mobile mmWave Communication: Achieving Low Power and Delay via a Hybrid RF Design

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

By 2020, annual data traffic is expected to surpass 130 exabits. This deluge of traffic will significantly exacerbate the spectrum crunch problem that cellular providers are already experiencing. To support this significant increase in traffic demand, it is envisioned that 5G cellular systems will use certain portions of the millimeter-Wave (mmWave) band, spanning the spectrum between 30GHz to 300GHz. This will substantially increase the spectrum available for cellular providers who are currently confined to the frequency spectrum between 700MHz and 2.6GHz with only 780MHz of bandwidth allocation for all current cellular technologies. However, before mmWave communication can become a reality, it faces significant challenges due to variable channels, intermittent connectivity, high delay, and high-energy usage that need to be addressed. To overcome these challenges, this project will develop and implement the necessary architecture and associated algorithms to exploit the mmWave and RF interfaces in a fully integrated fashion. The proposed research is ambitious, but if successful is expected to take an important step towards the development of mobile mmWave technology, which will significantly alleviate the enormous spectrum crunch that we are currently encountering. The proposed research will be conducted across three major inter-related thrusts: 1. Scaled-down experimentation for mobile mmWave propagation: It has been experimentally demonstrated that the time-scale separation assumption made by the current models of wireless propagation does not work for mobile mmWave. This project will develop a measurement setup that uses small-scale models for different environments of interest and take the measurements at proportionally high frequencies. This novel framework enables accurate mobile measurements, jointly at the RF and mmWave interfaces without having to build actual real-world systems. 2. Energy-efficient communication: Despite the availability of huge bandwidths at the mmWave interface, it is not energy efficient to utilize it fully at all times. Furthermore, connection setup and beamforming can consume significant resources. To alleviate these challenges, this project will carefully exploit the correlations across RF and mmWave interfaces in order to maximize the achieved rate per unit power consumed. One of major goals is to handle fast mmWave beamforming completely in the analog domain. 3. Low-delay communication: Taking into account the high variability of mmWave channels, this project will develop a framework to jointly manage the queues at the RF and mmWave interfaces. The associated delay minimization and queue management schemes explicitly take into account the processor read/write speed relative to the mmWave link rates.