A First Look at 802.11ad Performance on a Smartphone

Abstract

We present the first, to our best knowledge, measurement study of 802.11ad on a commercial smartphone. We explore a number of different aspects including range and coverage, performance under various mobility patterns, and impact on power consumption. We find that, although the performance is generally inferior to that of a laptop, the phone can sustain Gbps rates and the power consumption is not prohibitively high. Overall, our results show that, in spite of earlier concerns, 802.11ad can be a viable candidate technology to address the needs of emerging bandwidth-intensive applications in smartphones.