On the feasibility of indoor IEEE 802.11ad WLANs

In this work, we argue against the common belief that millimeter-wave (mmwave) technology is not a viable option for building general purpose indoor WLANs due to the high directionality and susceptibility to blockage of 60GHz links. Our initial experiments, with commodity 802.11ad hardware, present a very encouraging picture, as far as range and blockage by commonly found materials in indoor WLAN environments is concerned. We observe that, while a typical indoor environment presents unique challenges in terms of presence of obstacles, it also provides communication opportunities with multiple available paths between the sender and receiver through the abundance of reflective surfaces. Our results clearly indicate that previously reported observations regarding 60GHz links inside datacenters or outdoor picocells do not apply to an indoor WLAN setup and thus motivate further work towards building multi-Gigabit indoor 802.11ad WLANs.