HackMan: hacking commodity millimeter-wave hardware for a measurement study
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HackMan: hacking commodity millimeter-wave hardware for a measurement study Chao Cai1
•
Zhen Chen1 • Jun Luo1 • Linwei Zhu2 • Menglan Hu2
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The extremely high frequency of Millimeter-Wave technology warrants Gbps throughput for the next-generation wireless communication systems, but mmWave signals also suffer from severe path loss due to high attenuation. To compensate for this loss, mmWave radios establish communication links via directional beams so as to increase channel gains and communication range. Until recently, the measurement studies on mmWave technology were mainly based on prototypes built from band-limited Software Defined Radio, which could not characterize performance in realistic settings. Latest studies using commodity hardware reports straightforward measurements on the impact of environment settings but did not present deep analysis on the correlations of low-layer information. Meanwhile, those studies lack the ability to configure commodity devices under controlled settings, for instance, a single beam pattern for experimentation, thus failing to perform deeper analysis on low-layer protocol parameters. In this paper, we conduct extensive measurements in typical indoor settings, utilizing 802.11ad-compliant commodity hardware. Different from earlier studies, we hack the firmware and gain the privilege to modify physical layer settings online, enabling us to gain more insights under controlled settings. Essentially, we have demonstrated that (1) Signal-to-Noise Ratio, the criteria for beam control, may not be positively correlated with throughput, (2) sticking to a single beam pattern during data transmission can lead to both channel gains and throughput improvement, and (3) only independent cross-links could interfere with each other while multi-links coordinated by one AP experience no interference. These insights lead us to rethink the existing beam control policy.
1 Introduction The Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) technology, utilizing the unlicensed 57–64 GHz spectrum, warrants multi-Gbps data rate for the next-generation wireless communication & Chao Cai [email protected] Zhen Chen [email protected] Jun Luo [email protected] Linwei Zhu [email protected] Menglan Hu [email protected] 1
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
2
School of Electronic Information and Communication, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
system [1]. The drastic increase in data rate would revolutionize traditional wireless networking [2–9] and bring about novel applications [10–13] including, among others, wireless Virtual Reality (VR), distribution of high-definition videos, and rapid file synchronization [14]. The ratification of the IEEE 802.11ad standard [15] has led to the release of several commercial-off-the-shelf (COST) mmWave networking devices, such as DELL D5000 dock [16], TP-LINK Talon AD7200
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