Towards Hybrid Electronic-Mechanical Beamforming for IEEE 802.11ad

Electronical beamforming (EBF) is an enabling technology for millimeter-wave (mmWave)-based communication; it is used by standards like IEEE 802.11ad known as WiGig. As WiGig commercial off-the-shelf solutions must be inexpensive, the EBF cannot be freely controlled; instead the beamforming is chosen from a small set of preconfigured configurations, which limits its gain. In this paper, we propose hybrid WiGig (hWiGig), which provides an additional mechanical steering on top of the WiGig's EBF by enabling physical rotation of the mmWave antenna array. A proof of concept prototype is implemented and used to quantify its gain. Experimental results reveal a large improvement in terms of throughput, especially in NLOS environments with a gain of up to 13.4x. Moreover, random strategies which test only a few physical orientations achieve still high performance gain which underlines hWiGig practical relevance.