Distributed Antenna System for Mitigating Shadowing Effect in 60 GHz WLAN

The 60GHz unlicensed frequency band has been adopted to support high data rate WLAN applications. The problem of this frequency band is that the wireless signal is vulnerable to the shadowing of objects. Especially in indoor scenarios, humans may frequently block the signal paths that cause disconnections of devices. This problem can be mitigated by using multiple antennas that can create rich signal paths between the devices. The idea presented in this paper is to employ a distributed antenna system (DAS) architecture enabled by radio-over-fiber technology to alleviate the shadowing problem. In the DAS architecture, multiple remote antenna units (RAUs), each of them equipped with an antenna array, are connected with the sameWLAN access points via optical fibers. But there are questions that need to be answered, including the beamforming strategy with multiple RAUs, and the placement and the required number of the RAUs. These questions are related to factors like room size, population density, etc.We discuss these questions in this paper and present our findings Anthony Lo is currently with Huawei Technologies. The work was done while he was with Delft University of Technology. Q. Wang (B) · D. Debbarma · Z. Cao · I. Niemegeers · S. Heemstra de Groot COBRA Research Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology, Den Dolech 2, 5612 AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] D. Debbarma e-mail: [email protected] Z. Cao e-mail: [email protected] I. Niemegeers e-mail: [email protected] S. Heemstra de Groot e-mail: [email protected] A. Lo Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]