Applications and Challenges of Multi-band Gigabit Mesh Networks

60 GHz has attracted a lot of commercial interest due to its abundance of unlicensed bandwidth and the recent advances in building inexpensive transceivers. Multiple research and standardization efforts have touted the potential of 60 GHz for a wide range of applications across WPANs and WLANs. However, the link characteristics at 60 GHz make it very challenging to provide the range and robustness similar to what most users have experienced with Wi-Fi at 2.4 and 5 GHz. In this paper, we propose the system design concept of multi-band gigabit mesh networks and articulate why it would help meet some of these challenges. We first examine the applications and usage scenarios with a critical focus on range, channel condition and the impact on user experience. We present a comparative study of range versus data rate tradeoff at 5 and 60 GHz to show that a multi-hop 60 GHz link can potentially provide the range that is comparable to 5 GHz and still outperform a single-hop 5 GHz link in terms of end-to-end throughput. Simulation results are provided to show the potential of the multi-band mesh design for effective spatial reuse. We discuss the key design issues for the multi-band gigabit mesh and point out some of the open research questions for future work.