Transmission Range Analysis of IEEE 802.15.3c Technology in Residential Environments

The 60 GHz frequency band is very promising, since it offers a huge amount of unlicensed spectrum that can provide very high throughput even with simple modulations. One of the different standardization initiatives for WPAN applications in 60 GHz is IEEE 802.15.3c, recently released. The goal of this study is to determine the maximum transmission range of IEEE 802.15.3c technology in its various options and in different propagation scenarios. The analysis focuses on residential environments. Use cases with simple antennas or featuring more complex directional antennas are considered. The study shows that solutions based on low complexity implementation choices (low gain antennas, simple channel code), are only suitable for scenarios without obstacles and distances of a few meters. The use of more sophisticated antenna solutions (antenna arrays with adaptive beamforming) and complex channel coding achieves high performance even in the worst propagation scenarios.