An Experimental Study of Rate and Beam Adaptation in 60 GHz WLANs
Shivang Aggarwal, Urjit Satish Sardesai, Viral Sinha, Dimitrios Koutsonikolas · 2020
In this paper, we conduct an extensive experimental study of the two primary link adaptation mechanisms in 60 GHz WLANs, namely rate adaptation and beam adaptation, using a large data set collected from a 60 GHz software-defined radio testbed. First, we compare the effectiveness of the two mechanisms in a variety of indoor environments and scenarios, including linear and angular displacement, mobility, blockage, and interference. Next, we study the effectiveness of two rate adaptation approaches -- SNR-based rate adaptation, which has been proposed by recent works, and a learning-based approach using PHY layer information. Our results show that the former performs poorly in practical scenarios, while the latter is promising, especially when combined with online training. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of maintaining backup beams to speedup link recovery and reduce the beam training overhead. We show that this heuristic fails in scenarios involving angular displacement on the receiver side but is quite effective in most other scenarios.