Demo: WiFi-Assisted 60 GHz Wireless Networks

Despite years of innovative research and development, multi-Gbps 60 GHz wireless networks are still not mainstream. The unfavorable propagation characteristics due to short wavelength and high directionality, makes the 60 GHz links highly vulnerable to blockage and mobility. However, the advent of multi-band chipsets opens the possibility of leveraging the more robust WiFi technology to assist 60 GHz in order to provide seamless, Gbps connectivity. In this demonstration, we will present MUST, an 802.11-compliant real-time system that provides seamless, high-speed connectivity over multi-band 60 GHz and WiFi devices. MUST has two key design components: (1) a WiFi-assisted 60 GHz link adaptation algorithm, which can instantaneously predict the best beam and PHY rate setting, with zero probing overhead at 60 GHz; and (2) a proactive blockage detection and switching algorithm which can re-direct ongoing user traffic to the robust interface within sub-10 ms latency. We have implemented MUST on off-the-shelf devices where our experiments show high throughput gain and almost 2 orders of magnitude cross-band switching latency improvement over state-of-the-art solutions.