SDMA for 60GHz Gigabit Wireless Networks

With the opening of the 60 GHz spectrum for WLANs, there has been a great deal of interest in academia and industry on how best to exploit the more than 5 GHz of available bandwidth. One goal in the wireless community has been delivering gigabit data rates to end users. For this, a variety of approaches have been studied in the past. In this paper, we present two SDMA (spatial division multiple access) algorithms that exploit the peculiar propagation properties of this part of the frequency. We show that in typical indoor environments, one access point can deliver over 8 Gbps total throughput while using only 640 MHz of the bandwidth. We generalize the algorithms to the case when multiple channels are available and show that with seven channels, we get aggregate throughput of over 31 Gbps.