A Low-Power mmWave Platform for the Internet of Things

Abstract

With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of devices will be connected to the Internet, enabling new applications such as digital twin, augmented reality, and smart home. These applications have placed a huge strain on today's wireless network. mmWave technology is promising to solve this problem by providing a large bandwidth over the very-high-frequency spectrum band. However, most mmWave radios and platforms have much higher power consumption than what IoT devices and their applications can afford. Hence, mmWave networks cannot be utilized in most IoT applications today. In this work, we present a novel low-power mmWave platform, which brings this technology to IoT applications. Our approach to design this platform is to take a holistic view and optimize the whole wireless system by considering practical challenges in mmWave communication. Our lowcost and low-power platform not only brings mmWave communication to IoT applications, but also enables researchers that do not have hardware background to work on mmWave research.