Wireless Gigabit Ethernet Extension

The increasing demand for high bandwidth and mobility has challenged research to design innovative broadband wireless access networks. The 60 GHz band has recently been attracting interest because of the huge bandwidth it can provide from its 3-7 GHz unlicensed spectrum available worldwide. However, until now a mature system design in the 60 GHz band is still lacking. In this paper we propose a novel architecture integrating a fiber optic infrastructure with 60 GHz wireless transmission capable of delivering a high data rate of 1 Gbps per cell in indoor environments. We use a WDM upgraded EPON as the fixed infrastructure and the 60 GHz band to provide the end user access and mobility. A centralized media access control mechanism derived from IEEE 802.3ah is adopted for efficient channel sharing. The use of standard components and the dynamic bandwidth allocation across wireless cells make the system a strong candidate for future gigabit wireless LANs.