Sense and Deploy: Blockage-Aware Deployment of Reliable 60 GHz mmWave WLANs

Abstract

60 GHz millimeter-wave networks have emerged as a potential candidate for designing the next generation of multi-gigabit WLANs. Since the 60 GHz links suffer from frequent outages due to blockages caused by human mobility, deploying 60 GHz WLANs that can provide robust coverage in presence of blockages is a challenging problem. In this paper, we study blockage-aware coverage and deployment of 60 GHz WLANs. We first show that the reflection profile of an indoor environment can be sensed using a few measurements. A novel coverage metric (angular spread coverage) which captures the number of available paths and their spatial diversity is proposed. Additionally, it is shown that using relays can extend the coverage of the AP at a lower cost and provide added spatial diversity in the available paths. We propose a heuristic algorithm that determines the AP and relay locations while maximizing the angular spread coverage metric for the clients. Our testbed-based evaluation shows that for five different rooms, our proposed deployment can guarantee an average connectivity of 91.7%, 83.9%, and 74.1% of client locations in the presence of 1, 3 and 5 concurrent human blockages respectively, substantially increasing the robustness of 60 GHz links against blockages.