Development of an indoor Wireless Personal Area Network based on mechanically steered millimeter-wave lens antenna

In this paper, the development and early implementation stages of a 60 GHz indoor Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) demonstrator is presented. The transmission system is based on a millimeter-wave lens antenna which is mechanically steered to keep track of the transmitting unit. The need for increasing data rate of personal communication systems has led to the use of millimeter-wave systems for indoor use. These systems use the unlicensed spectrum from 57 GHz to 66 GHz. Applications can include for example, the transmission of full HD video or camcorder wireless connection to the home video system. The developed system contains a FPGA based device that receives data from a PC by a USB link, encodes it and sends it to the moveable transmit unit. In the stationary unit end, the received RF power is used in a tracking controller which mechanically steers the receiving antenna beam to maximize the received power. The received signal is also processed by a second FPGA based device which then sends the data by USB to the receiving PC.