Future home networks

Abstract

Currently, common frequency spectrum is densely allocated and this leads to search for alternative frequency bands. 60 GHz band attracts attention for its potential in future communication. It offers globally available, license-free, very large bandwidth for high data rate communication. At 60 GHz frequency band, severe attenuation of the signals can significantly degrade communication performance. To cope with the attenuation problem, relays or directional antennas with high directive gains can be utilized. Both methods have additional challenges among their benefits. It is analytically and through simulations shown that having a relay node in the middle of a 60 GHz network decreases the average free-space path loss 33% in the worst case scenario. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study to address effect of relay on path loss analytically in a generic form. When network nodes use directional antennas, the neighbor discovery process becomes more complicated and time consuming. There are not many studies assuming pure directional transmission and reception at all steps of communication. Random selection among sectors is generally used for pure directional communication. To reduce the neighbor discovery time, we propose a smart neighbor scanning algorithm in this work. It is observed that the proposed strategy discovers 70% of the links 81% faster and 90% of the links 15% faster than random scanning strategy for a typical home network scenario. A condition to have a path between any two nodes and a stochastic model to observe isolation trend in home networks are also presented. The results of this thesis motivate the multi-hop communication, use of directional antennas for 60 GHz indoor networks.