Many-to-Many Beam Alignment in Millimeter Wave Networks [NSDI’19]

Millimeter Wave (mmWave) networks can deliver multi-Gbps
wireless links that use extremely narrow directional beams.
This provides us with a new opportunity to exploit spatial
reuse in order to scale network throughput. Exploiting such
spatial reuse, however, requires aligning the beams of all
nodes in a network. Aligning the beams is a difficult process which is complicated by indoor multipath, which can
create interference, as well as by the inefficiency of carrier
sense at detecting interference in directional links. This paper presents BounceNet, the first many-to-many millimeter
wave beam alignment protocol that can exploit dense spatial
reuse to allow many links to operate in parallel in a confined
space and scale the wireless throughput with the number of
clients. Results from three millimeter wave testbeds show
that BounceNet can scale the throughput with the number
of clients to deliver a total network data rate of more than
39 Gbps for 10 clients, which is up to 6.6× higher than current
802.11 mmWave standards.

Video:


Paper:

Many-to-Many Beam Alignment in Millimeter Wave Networks
Suraj Jog, Jiaming Wang, Junfeng Guan, Thomas Moon, Haitham Hassanieh, Romit Roy Choudhury