Feasibility Study of a Mm-Wave Impulse Radio Using Measured Radio Channels

A millimeter-wave (mm-wave) impulse radio is an attractive alternative to existing high-speed mm- wave radio systems because of the potential for a simpler transceiver architecture. This paper studies the feasibility of a mm-wave impulse radio system for home and office use by considering state-of-the- art transceivers and multiple-input multiple-output measured propagation channels as well as the IEEE 802.15.3c channel model. Our analysis reveals that reliable data transmission is infeasible even in line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios because of a low power level at the Rx if we do not use beamforming. However, introducing 7×7 beamforming at the Tx dramatically improves the coverage beyond 5 m distance in the LOS scenario and up to 5 m in a non- line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario, though the performance varies in the NLOS scenario, depending on the Tx and Rx locations. We propose an adaptive transmit signaling scheme that adjusts the pulse repetition frequency depending on the delay dispersion of the propagation channel in order to avoid intersymbol interference and keep the Rx structure simple. The proposed transmit signaling scheme leads to a pulse transmission rate of 250 Mpulses/s in all measured channels while the rate is lower when the 802.15.3c model is considered because of a more multipath-rich characteristics than our measured channels.