Augmenting Transmission Environments for Better Communications: Tunable Reflector Assisted MmWave WLANs
Augmenting Transmission Environments for Better Communications: Tunable Reflector Assisted MmWave WLANs
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DOI：
10.1109/tvt.2020.2991547
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发表时间：
2020-04
影响因子：
6.8
通讯作者：
Lan Zhang;Li Yan;B. Lin;Haichuan Ding;Yuguang Fang;X. Fang
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Lan Zhang;Li Yan;B. Lin;Haichuan Ding;Yuguang Fang;X. Fang
传统的无线传输设计主要集中在操纵终端设备以更好地适应传输环境，例如信道编码和调制技术，其性能受到传输环境质量的显著影响。在本文中，我们提出了一个创新的想法，主动操纵，重新配置和增强无线传输环境，以更好地支持端到端的服务。具体来说，我们实现这个想法到商业化的毫米波（mmWave）无线局域网（WLAN），以解决毫米波频段的堵塞漏洞。在不破坏环境的美学性质的情况下，我们部署了多个小块高反射金属反射表面作为可调反射器，通过调整反射表面的方向来创建替代的间接视线链接。为了证明我们的想法，我们设计了一种新的自适应机制，mmRef，使可调反射器在毫米波无线局域网，其中的系统架构，操作程序和信令过程中的实施，分别开发。为了从理论上量化预期的好处，我们表征的中断概率和系统吞吐量的mmRef机制的基础上随机几何理论。仿真和数值结果表明，实施mmRef的有效性和显着改善系统性能。
Conventional design of wireless transmissions mainly focuses on manipulating end devices to better adapt to the transmission environments, such as channel coding and modulation techniques, whose performance is significantly affected by the quality of the transmission environments. In this paper, we propose an innovative idea to proactively manipulate, reconfigure, and augment wireless transmission environments to better support end-to-end services. Specifically, we implement this idea into the commercialized millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless local area networks (WLANs) to address the vulnerability to blockages in mmWave bands. Without damaging the aesthetic nature of environments, we deploy multiple small-piece highly-reflective metallic reflecting surfaces as tunable reflectors, where alternative indirect line-of-sight links are created by tuning the orientations of the reflecting surfaces. To demonstrate our idea, we devise a novel adaptive mechanism, mmRef, to enable the implementation of tunable reflectors in mmWave WLANs, where the system architecture, operational procedures, and the signaling process are developed, respectively. To theoretically quantify the expected benefits, we characterize the outage probability and system throughput of mmRef mechanism based on stochastic geometry theory. Simulation and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of implementing mmRef and the significantly improved system performance.