Coordinated Multiple Access Point Multiuser Beamforming Training Protocol for Millimeter Wave WLANs

Millimeter wave (mmWave) systems have attracted considerable attention as a benefit of their Gbps services. Therefore, wireless-gigabit (WiGig) transmission has been developed based on the IEEE 802.11ad and 802.11ay standards of wireless local area networks (WLANs) in the 60-GHz band. To overcome the high path loss of mmWave, beamforming and beam-sector based training protocols are specified in 802.11ad/ay. With the increase in service demand, more WiGig access points (APs) will be deployed, hence the transmission frame structure of beam control should be adjustable for supporting both multiple APs and multiple users. The conventional exhaustive beam search (EBS) scheme has a potentially excessive complexity for high number of beams. Furthermore, assigning fixed training slots for users will lead to high-latency beam training under EBS. Hence, we design an advanced protocol for multiple APs and multiple users. Based on this protocol, we propose coordinated multiple AP multiuser training (CMMBT) including variable length framing and adjustable beam training. Our simulations demonstrate that CMMBT provides flexible training control and achieves the lowest training latency and highest average throughput performance amongst the state-of-the-art solutions in the open literature.