WiFiUS: An Architecture for Future Configurable Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks

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This project aims at addressing the fundamental challenges and developing novel techniques to enable configurable millimeter wave (mmWave) small cell networks. These techniques have great potential to meet the exponentially growing wireless data demand in the next-generation cellular systems. The research outcomes are expected to significantly increase per-user network throughput, and could thus influence future industry standards. Complementary to the research agenda, the project also plans a broad range of education and outreach activities, including the integration of the research findings into courses for graduate and undergraduate students training in wireless systems, the involvement of undergraduate students in research and testbed prototyping for valuable hands-on experience, and the outreach to students from underrepresented groups via various channels.Technically, this project solves new problems and develops new mechanisms in the following three thrusts that are critical to future mmWave networks: (i) Modeling of correlated mmWave channel shadow fading, which focuses on deriving realistic shadowing correlation models for mmWave channels in dense urban and indoor environments by using field measurement data in order to gain a deep understanding of mmWave transmission characteristics. These models in turn help predict the impact of link variations on higher layer protocols and network performance for optimal system design. (ii) Multipath media access control (MAC), which develops a novel MAC protocol that allows a mobile device to establish multiple connections to the core network over several base stations and relaying nodes to address the challenges of unreliable and highly directional mmWave links, as well as frequent shadow fading and handoffs in mmWave small cell networks. (iii) mmWave configurable antennas and control algorithms, where the team designs new configurable mmWave antennas that provide great flexibility and performance in adaptive beamforming, as well as the control algorithms for antenna adaptation and wireless resource management. In addition, the project includes a testbed validation component that supports a number of experimental tasks for validating the effectiveness of the techniques developed in the project. The validation tasks also allow the integration of the developed configurable antennas, the control algorithms, and the higher layer protocols, so that their impact on the performance of the system as a whole can be investigated, and the optimal cross-layer control and adaptation strategy can be obtained.