Multi-User Multi-Stream mmWave WLANs With Efficient Path Discovery and Beam Steering

Multi-stream 60 GHz communication can potentially achieve data rates up to 100 Gbps via multiplexing multiple data streams. Unfortunately, establishing multi-stream directional links is a high overhead procedure as the search space increases with the number of spatial streams and the product of AP-client beam resolution. In this paper, we present MUlti-stream beam-Training for mm-wavE networks (MUTE) a novel system that leverages channel sparsity, GHz-scale sampling rate, and the knowledge of mm-Wave RF codebook beam patterns to construct a set of candidate beams for efficient multi-stream beam steering. MUTE repurposes the mandatory periodic beam sweeps in 60 GHz WLANs to discover the dominant paths of the mmWave channel between the AP and any client with zero additional overhead. Coupling path estimates with beam pattern knowledge, MUTE selects a set of candidate beams that capture diverse or ideally orthogonal paths to obtain maximum stream separability. Our over-the-air experiments demonstrate that MUTE achieves 90% of the maximum achievable aggregate PHY rate while incurring only 1.2% of exhaustive search’s training overhead.