Networked beamforming in dense mmWave WLANs

ABSTRACTDensely deployed base stations/access points (APs) are becoming increasingly common in mmWave networks with the need to provide high capacity and reliability to clients. However, frequent beamforming between clients and APs incurs an unacceptable overhead in densely deployed mmWave WLANs with many APs. This paper presents a novel approach of "networked beamforming" where only a small subset of APs are selected for beamforming in each beacon interval in mmWave WLANs. By building a prediction model based on the concept of uncertainty, our networked beamforming scheme predicts the APs whose beamforming information is likely outdated and needs updating. The proposed approach complements the existing per-link beamforming solutions and extends their effectiveness from link-level to network-level. With experimentation, we show that our scheme can significantly reduce beamforming overhead and improve network capacity for dense mmWave WLANs.