Modulation and detection strategies for 60 GHz UWB high-data rate wireless indoor communications

60 GHz mmWaves radios nowadays are considered as a core short-range wireless technology capable to solve the spectrum shortage due to the exponentially increasing number of wireless users and QoS sensitive multimedia and home entertainment applications. Although there are several published standards, the 60 GHz wireless developmental field is still open as the behavior of the channel is not well studied along the whole available bandwidth - at different carrier frequencies, and also, there is scarcity of research evaluating different transmission technologies besides the standard-defined OFDM and SC-FDE. In this paper, by carefully realized realistic application scenarios, we comparatively analyze the performance of different modulation and detection schemes, using experimental channel impulse responses recorded through an indoor measurement campaign in eight sub-bands from 54 to 66 GHz at several distances in two typical environments: office and residential. The measurements allow us to evaluate the impact of changes in multipath profiles, due to both frequency and surrounding environment, on the bit error rate performance of 60 GHz impulse radio (IR)-UWB signaling, i.e. pulse position modulation (PPM) and pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), and conventional quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), comparing the performance of different schemes of Rake detection (partial and selective) in modern residential and office environments. The impact of the carrier frequency and the surrounding environment on the achievable performance is also discussed. The results obtained in this study show that different low-complexity Rake receiver architectures are valuable candidates for the future 60 GHz WPANs and WLANs transceivers.