Inter-link interference measurement of indoor dense millimeter-wave WLANs

An exponential increase in the number of smart mobile devices with high demands of wireless data traffic is driving Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) toward high-density deployments and millimeter-wave (mmWave) operations. Inter-link interference is a crucial factor in such systems, which impacts on the link performance and system capacity. However, it has not been well-investigated yet. We conducted a measurement campaign on inter-link interference in a meeting room environment with dense deployment of mmWave WLANs. Some key impact factors, such as the beamwidths and positions of transmitter and receiver as well as the number of active links in a network, were investigated. Our measurement results demonstrate that the decrease of the beamwidths of transmitter and receiver and/or the decrease of the number of active links in the network can significantly improve the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) due to reduction of the inter-link interference. Furthermore, it is observed that the inter-link interference in a dense deployment environment mainly depends on a few dominated active links.