Beam Codebook Based Beamforming Protocol for Multi-Gbps Millimeter-Wave WPAN Systems

In this paper, we propose a feasible beamforming (BF) scheme realized in media access control (MAC) layer following the guidelines of the IEEE 802.15.3c criteria for millimeterwave 60 GHz wireless personal area networks (60 GHz WPANs). The proposed BF targets to minimize the BF set-up time and mitigates the high path loss of 60 GHz WPAN systems. It is based on designed multi-resolution codebooks, which generate three kinds of patterns of different half power beam widths (HPBWs): quasi-omni pattern, sector and beam. These three kinds of patterns are employed in the three stages of the BF protocol, namely device-to-device (DEV-to-DEV) linking, sector-level searching and beam-level searching. All the three stages can be completed within one superframe, which minimizes the potential interference to other systems during BF set-up period. In this paper, we show some example codebooks and provide the details of BF procedure. Simulation results show that the setup time of the proposed BF protocol is as small as 2% when compared to the exhaustive searching protocol. The proposed BF is a complete design, it re-uses commands specified in IEEE 802.15.3c, completely compliant to the standard; It has thus been adopted by IEEE 802.15.3c as an optional functionality to realize Giga-bit-per-second (Gbps) communication in WPAN Systems.