Practical LOS MIMO Technique for Short-Range Millimeter-Wave Systems

The widespread availability and use of digital multimedia content has created a need for faster wireless connectivity that current commercial standards cannot support. For example, new generation of display and input-output (IO) interfaces require data rates well in excess of 10 Gbps. The large amount of spectrum in the unlicensed 60 GHz millimeter-wave (mmWave) band offers the most promising approach to meet this challenge, but existing standards operating in this band are limited to data rates below 7 Gbps. Therefore, in this paper we propose a practical mmWave technique that combines the benefits of multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) transmissions and a line-of-sight (LOS) communication channel, hereby referred to as LOS MIMO. Different implementations for LOS MIMO using various options for stream separation techniques including separation in the radio front-end (RF), in the baseband, or by polarization are also discussed. The performance of these LOS MIMO implementations is evaluated by simulations. We show that LOS MIMO systems based on low-power phased antenna arrays can operate at the distances up to several meters and achieve data rates above ten Gbps, thus meeting the requirement of the new generation high-speed interfaces.