Evaluation of Latency in IEEE 802.11ad

It has increasingly become apparent that bandwidth of transmissions will no longer be a constraint in new generations of wireless communications. This is expected to drastically lower the latency in the transmissions and bring about improvement in the QoS of the transmissions. However, the new radio access technologies (e.g. mmWave) will have issues such as beamforming, beam tracking, and resultant overheads which can cause bottlenecks in reduction of latency. New techniques will then be required to overcome these bottlenecks. Medium access is no longer being considered only in terms of either contention-based or contention-free modes; hybrid approaches such as in IEEE 802.11ad are now being implemented. Moreover, the traditional concepts of transmission control, reliability, etc., require new thinking in view of the change brought about by the new generations of wireless transmissions. This paper evaluates the impacts on latency in IEEE 802.11ad which is the settled protocol for short-distance LAN in 60 GHz mmWave domain.