60 GHz UWB rake receivers in a realistic scenario for wireless home entertainment

By providing reliable high-capacity wireless links, the 60 GHz mmWaves band is expected to revolutionize the future wireless multimedia and home entertainment usage model, which is an inseparable part of the 5G concept. Besides the efforts within the frameworks of established standards, such as 802.15.3.c and 802.11ad, there is still lack of experimental measurements and performance evaluations in those environments that closely correspond to the different envisaged realistic application scenarios. Also, the potential of different transmission technologies at this band, besides the OFDM and SC-FDE, which are defined by the above mentioned standards, is not largely investigated in the literature. In this paper, based on UWB experimental channel impulse responses recorded in a modern residential environment, we evaluate the performance of Rake receivers to achieve high data rates (HDRs) with reasonable SNR, but still low Rake´s complexity, with the purpose of meeting the QoS requirements of the wireless home entertainment use case. The bit-error rate performance evaluation of both partial and selective Rakes is applied to QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation schemes, defined in the existing standards. The promising results obtained in this study place the Rake receiver architecture as a valuable candidate for future 60 GHz WPANs and WLANs transceivers.