A Comprehensive Analysis and Performance Enhancements for the IEEE 802.11ay Group

Published

January 4, 2022

Author(s)

Tanguy Ropitault

Abstract

Millimeter-wave technology provides the necessary improvements in capacity and performance for the next generation of wireless networks. The new IEEE 802.11ay amendment extends IEEE 802.11ad to offer 100 Gbps connectivity in the unlicensed 60 GHz band through the introduction of several technical advancements such as Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO), channel bonding and aggregation. Additionally, it offers many improvements to the Beamforming Training (BFT) process in order to improve its efficiency and accuracy. One new technique defined by IEEE 802.11ay is Group Beamforming, which allows to simultaneously train all stations at once, and significantly reduces training overhead, especially in very dense networks. In this paper, we provide an implementation of IEEE 802.11ay in ns-3 and perform, to the best of our knowledge, the first detailed system-level evaluation of the performance of the novel IEEE 802.11ay protocol. We specifically study the performance of Group Beamforming and compare it against the legacy 802.11ad BFT. We explore how different beamtraining approaches scale in large networks, identify the possible problems and look at how the BFT process influences the performance of the network overall. Our analysis shows that Group Beamforming can outperform the legacy approach, resulting in lower overhead and improved network performance. However it also has severe limitations particularly when training the access points in the network. Lastly, we propose several improvements to Group Beamforming that improve performance and provide robust beamforming even in very dense scenarios.

Proceedings Title

IEEE ICNP 2021 The 29th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols Virtual Event, November 2-5, 2021

Conference Dates

November 2-5, 2021

Conference Location

Virtual Event, TX, US

Conference Title

IEEE ICNP 2021

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

Millimeter Wave, IEEE 802.11ay, Group Beamforming, 60 GHz, WiGig, ns-3, Simulations

Citation

Ropitault, T. (2022), A Comprehensive Analysis and Performance Enhancements for the IEEE 802.11ay Group, IEEE ICNP 2021 The 29th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols Virtual Event, November 2-5, 2021 , Virtual Event, TX, US (Accessed April 16, 2024)