SDR-based 60 GHz Solution for mmWave Applications: Implementation and Evaluation

To meet the ever-increasing demands for high data rates, research- and technical communities are advocating the use of millimeter-waves (mmWave) for the next generation wireless networks. The mmWave spectrum (30-300 GHz) offers a large portion of unused bandwidth. Among the available mmWave frequency bands, the 60 GHz band is particularly interesting as it is license free and can be used for different applications, ranging from short-range communications to vehicular radars and medium-to-long range wireless links. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a mmWave solution in the 60 GHz band that has been carried out within different H2020 projects over past years. The core of the solution is a proprietary field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board with software-defined radio (SDR) capability and a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) 60 GHz radio-frequency (RF) beamforming front-end module. It implements a proprietary orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) baseband processor and medium-access control (MAC) layer. The designed solution is tested in indoor and outdoor communication scenarios using SDR and real-time mode. The performance measurements in different settings show a data rate of 936 Mb/s and an average round-trip time latency of around 0.25 milliseconds.