CRII: NeTS: Beyond PHY and Chanel Measurements in Millimeter Wave: Towards Low-Overhead and Resilient Multi-hop Networking

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The 5G-and-beyond technologies will enable an unprecedented proliferation of applications with ultra-low latency and extremely-high data rate requirements such as mobile AR/VR applications. There is also an ever-increasing trend in the number of wireless devices that is now already over 8.6 billion and is expected to grow to 12.3 billion by 2022. The increasing density of wireless devices with high data rate requirements has caused spectrum crunch in the sub-6GHz bands. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies between 30GHz to 300GHz can alleviate the spectrum scarcity and provide major potentials for future cellular and emerging WiFi networks with Gbps data rates. Current studies have mostly focused on understanding wireless channel impairments and propagation characteristics at high frequencies. While such efforts are essential, there are gaps in developing network protocols tailored for mmWave. This project takes a system-level approach to develop and implement algorithms for reliable mmWave networking with guaranteed end-to-end performance. It also provides great opportunities for curriculum enhancement by introducing new trends and challenges in future wireless networks, training students from under-represented populations at different levels, and attracting young minds, including high-school students, to the STEM areas via appealing demos of mmWave applications. The significant differences between mmWave and sub-6GHz call for a radical rethinking of the design principles across all the layers of the protocol stack. Currently, the upper layers of the protocol stack remain largely unexplored and the existing protocols are not tailored for mmWave communication. This project develops protocols and implements a testbed for low-overhead and resilient multi-hop mmWave communication with mobility and link blockage. The proposed research will be conducted across three inter-related thrusts: (1) Low-overhead Beam Alignment for Multi-hop Settings: Leveraging multi-armed bandit (MAB) frameworks, this thrust will develop an efficient beam alignment algorithm that considerably reduces the angular beam search space and overall beam alignment overhead, which is essential for dense mmWave networks with multi-hop topologies; (2) Fault-Tolerant Multi-hop Routing to Combat Blockage: In order to guarantee reliable and robust mmWave communication under blockage, this thrust will resort to network and routing layer solutions to develop an on-demand routing protocol that is able to quickly recover under a link blockage; (3) Optimal Buffer Allocation in Multi-hop Networks: This thrust will investigate the problem of optimal buffer allocation in multi-hop mmWave networks with multi-users. The goal is to strike an optimal tradeoff between delay and throughput performance and provide a fair allocation across different data flows.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.