Poster Abstract: mmWave on the Road – Field Testing IEEE 802.11ad WLAN at 60 GHz

Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) communication is gaining importance in many networking applications due to the potential of wide channel bandwidth enabling multi-gigabit throughput and low delays. In the consumer electronics field, IEEE 802.11ad is already widely available, which has been developed mainly for indoor use cases. This protocol particularly benefits from dynamic beamforming. The communication performance of these algorithms is still little explored in outdoor scenarios. We present results from field measurements of IEEE 802.11ad on the road. We started with static network scenarios and then moved to dynamic scenarios using two cars driving through the city of Berlin. As can be seen from our results, a quite stable communication is possible in static scenarios, but mobile scenarios prevent quick beam alignment and thus significantly impact the performance.