A Pro-Active Beamforming Protocol for Multi-Gbps Millimeter-Wave WPAN Systems

In this paper, we propose the pro-active beamforming (BF) protocol realized in media access control (MAC) layer following IEEE 802.15.3c criteria for millimeter-wave 60GHz wireless personal area networks (60GHz WPANs). The pro-active BF may be used when the piconet controller (PNC) is the source of data to one or multiple devices (DEVs). It allows multiple DEVs to train their own receiver antennas for optimal reception from the PNC with lower overhead. The pro-active BF realizes part of BF operation in association process, extending the system's BF capability. It also enables DEVs to associate with PNC with directional antenna pattern, thus enlarges the coverage area of a piconet. Since it may train multiple users simultaneously based on the proposed multi-resolution codebooks, it significantly decreases the BF set-up time and mitigates the high path loss of 60GHz WPAN systems. Simulation results show that the proposed pro-active BF further reduce more than 20% of the BF set-up time comparing with on-demand BF in the multiple DEVs scenarios. It is completely compliant to IEEE 802.15.3c, and adopted by IEEE 802.15.3c as an important compliment to the on-demand BF to realize Giga-bit-per-second (Gbps) communication in WPAN Systems.