Beamforming performance analysis for OFDM based IEEE 802.11ad millimeter-wave WPANs

This paper exploits the performance of three types of beamforming techniques over the 60 GHz orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The effective SNR over typical IEEE 802.11ad channel models is used as the criterion to compare the beamforming performance. Symbol-wise beamforming reduces the complexity considerably compared to subcarrier-wise beamforming with some performance loss, while hybrid beamforming provides much less performance degradation at a reasonable cost. In order to verify the results, the bit error rate (BER) performance is simulated. In addition, the system throughput over range is presented in the paper.