On the performance of IEEE 802.15.3c millimeter-wave WPANs: PHY and MAC

The large amount of unlicensed bandwidth available in the millimeter-wave has enabled very high data rate wireless applications. The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 3c has completed standardization efforts for multi-gigabit data rate communications on both the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers. This paper presents a performance evaluation of the PHY and MAC layers of the newly published standard. Packet error rate (PER) and PHY throughput are simulated for different modes based on a typical 60 GHz channel model. The theoretical MAC throughput is calculated for different packet sizes and modes under different link conditions. The link adaptation mechanism is used to analyze the operating range versus data rate. The results show that very high data rates can be achieved over low distances.