WiFiUS: An Architecture for Future Configurable Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks

该项目旨在解决基本挑战并开发新技术，以实现可配置毫米波（mmWave）小型蜂窝网络。这些技术在满足下一代蜂窝系统中指数级增长的无线数据需求方面具有巨大的潜力。该研究成果有望显著提高每用户网络吞吐量，从而影响未来的行业标准。作为研究议程的补充，该项目还计划开展广泛的教育和外展活动，包括将研究成果整合到研究生和本科生无线系统培训课程中，让本科生参与研究和试验台原型设计以获得宝贵的实践经验，以及通过各种渠道向代表性不足的群体的学生进行外展。从技术上讲，本项目解决了以下三个对未来毫米波网络至关重要的新问题并开发了新机制：(i)相关毫米波信道阴影衰落建模，重点是通过使用现场测量数据，得出密集城市和室内环境中毫米波信道的真实阴影相关模型，以深入了解毫米波传输特性。这些模型反过来又有助于预测链路变化对更高层协议和网络性能的影响，以实现最佳系统设计。（ii）多路径媒体访问控制（MAC），它开发了一种新的MAC协议，允许移动设备通过多个基站和中继节点建立到核心网络的多个连接，以解决不可靠和高度定向的毫米波链路的挑战，以及毫米波小型蜂窝网络中频繁的阴影衰落和切换。（iii）毫米波可配置天线和控制算法，该团队设计了新的可配置毫米波天线，在自适应波束形成方面提供了极大的灵活性和性能，以及天线自适应和无线资源管理的控制算法。此外，该项目包括一个测试平台验证组件，该组件支持许多实验任务，以验证项目中开发的技术的有效性。验证任务还允许将开发的可配置天线、控制算法和更高层协议集成在一起，以便研究它们对整个系统性能的影响，并获得最佳的跨层控制和自适应策略。

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 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.