Millimeter Waves are the Best Bridge to 5G

Enterprise-grade electromagnetic spectrum is the highway of wireless communications, with multiple lanes to carry traffic at different speeds. Higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths are capable of transmitting more information per unit of time.

Strictly speaking, millimeter wave can only refer to the EHF band, i.e. the frequency range of 30ghz-300ghz electromagnetic waves. Millimeter wave offers higher throughput and higher total capacity than LTE in bands below 6GHz.

Historically, millimeter wave technology has been expensive and difficult to deploy, limiting its use in radio astronomy, microwave remote sensing, and terrestrial fixed communications.

Recently, however, interest in it is growing significantly as these two obstacles have been student overcome to a large extent in our impact. Millimeter wave has evolved into a cost-effective option to meet the network capacity challenges facing enterprises today. We expect its price to continue to fall and its performance to continue to improve,qcm6490 making research into millimeter-wave solutions the preferred choice for businesses everywhere.

A wide variety of outdoor and indoor applications will benefit from this range of technologies.

Fixed Wireless

Traditional point-to-point (P2P) and point-to-multipoint (P2MP) microwave communications are well suited for millimeter wave solutions. Compared to microwave-based solutions, millimeter-wave products have little additional complexity and licensing, where necessary, is almost always handled by the equipment vendors or distributors that sell and install them. Parabolic antennas for millimeter-wave applications can already be seen in specialty applications such as bridging, backhaul and interconnections between campuses and buildings in large metropolitan areas, connectivity to ISPs, telemetry and surveillance.

Wireless PAN and LAN

The IEEE wireless LAN standards, 802.15.3 c, 802.11 ad Wi-Fi, and the upcoming 802.11 ay, all specify a 60 GHz band. Because millimeter wave signals have limited target penetration, range, and directionality, their applications are typically limited to indoor and open office environments to ensure visibility. We expect that universal access applications using 802.11 ad will become commonplace; chipsets are entering the market.

We also expect more outdoor and campus solutions based on these technologies. Over time, many existing microwave and millimeter-wave solutions will evolve into inexpensive P2P, P2MP, and mesh solutions based on 802.11ad components, providing wider deployment opportunities.

Similarly, we expect millimeter-wave components to enable access to a wide range of IoT solutions, as many of them will be aggregated to live able to adapt to short-range and mesh networks.

Although 802.11 ad has the potential to achieve zero-bit throughput,what is a distinguishing feature of 5g mmwave it is not really in use yet. This is largely due to the ability of 802.11 ac to respond to the 60 GHz band while meeting the growing demand for WLAN capacity. This is strikingly similar to the 5 GHz band that 802.11 a was originally introduced in 1999.

Considering the attractiveness of time, price and price/performance on the user experience curve, this situation may improve in the coming years.

5G Back

With 5G slated to largely replace all wireless WANs, significant new echo capacity will be needed even in the cost-effective world of wired broadband services. Since 5G will often be deployed with denser base stations using a "small cell" model, millimeter-wave echo makes sense, even within its inherent range limitations, and even in unlicensed spectrum. This is due to the applicability of narrow-beam, directional antenna and mesh technologies, allowing for fast and cost-effective deployment of echo capabilities.

5G access

More controversial is the use of millimeter waves in 5G mobile user access. Some experiments have shown that this should be a valuable option where base stations are dense and have appropriate beam control capabilities. However, it is unclear whether the industry will adopt large-scale millimeter wave mobile access with the need for appropriately equipped user equipment, which is apparently not yet listed.

In-vehicle applications

Millimeter-wave radar is already in use in some automobiles, and mobile connections at these frequencies may play a role in future network-based inter-vehicle links.

Extremely high frequencies are also useful in many positioning and tracking applications, both for short-range applications on desktop positioning devices and for more general outdoor applications. Uncompressed HDMI video is also often considered a critical application, although this type of application may become less important given the high performance and low cost video compression standards, algorithms and implementations currently available.

Finally, the use of millimeter waves for intra- and inter-device rack communications was investigated. While we find this a bit odd, consider that the cost of this link is likely to be much lower than fiber optics, and performance will not be compromised.

Millimeter Wave Progress

Extremely high frequencies have always been difficult to produce, and traditionally, their construction has required oscillators and other components involving expensive semiconductor processes. Most notably gallium arsenide (GaAs), which is a key reason why lower frequencies are so widely used.

However, in recent years we have learned how to make components that can operate at millimeter-wave frequencies, such as silicon germanium (SiGe), by using process designs that are more cost-effective for the enterprise in terms of methodology. This is especially true for the same complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processor, memory chip technology, and most of today's computing and communications-related components. CMOS is inexpensive, high-volume, higher-performance, and easy to integrate into related devices such as radios and OEM modules.

In short, we can now reliably and cost-effectively utilize millimeter-wave communications, but it is still not as smooth as the development of mature radio bands.

Millimeter-wave challenges

Obviously, there are some limitations to what millimeter waves can provide.

Propagation characteristics - Millimeter waves are highly directional, propagate in narrow beams, and are usually blocked by solid objects such as the walls of buildings. As a result, most millimeter wave applications are LOS, and the effective range for a given application is a function of the clarity of the desired path between endpoints, the power of the application, and the type and configuration of the antenna used. Of course, directional antennas, or even MIMO (depending on the multiple paths), beamforming, or even beam control via an array of active ("fixed-phase") antennas can be used to improve throughput and range. Antennas, even directional parabolic antennas, are usually quite small considering the tiny wavelengths involved.

However, the limitations caused by the underlying informational-physical behavior of waves at millimeter-wave frequencies China still apply. Signal attenuation is not a major problem at many millimeter-wave frequencies, but the 60 GHz band is not licensed.

This can be compensated for by using multi-node deployments with shorter distances between nodes, and the overall capacity can be significantly increased by frequency reuse techniques. Given narrow beams and directional antennas, we can usually effectively avoid interfering with other connections in the vicinity making the same frequency.

Other millimeter bands also show varying degrees of attenuation, but many bands, most notably 20-50,70-90 and 120-160 GHz, are only slightly affected. In short, the limitations of millimeter waves can usually be overcome and reduced to insignificant levels as long as a given band is well matched to the correct application.

Notably, the narrow beam, limited range, and associated behavior of millimeter waves actually contribute to enhanced security and integrity. In any case, encryption must be applied to all wireless links, and most commercial millimeter-wave products support encryption.

Management and Licensing - Both licensed and unlicensed frequencies are defined as millimeter-wave frequencies. The most common commercially licensed millimeter-wave bands are 27-31, 38, 71-76, 81-86, and 92-95ghz, and we can expect spectrum auction procedures to be increasingly applied to these bands.

Solution Topology-Millimeter bands are primarily used for fixed applications where both endpoints of a given link are fixed-P2P and P2MP applications. Going forward, we expect to see more use of mesh technology, which provides maximum flexibility and coverage in any network configuration.

Once a strange and expensive alternative to fixed network communications in outer space and on the ground, millimeter-wave wireless technology is now an inexpensive option that is cost-effective for enterprises to manage and in many cases meets ongoing network capacity challenges.

For enterprise IT, upgrading cabling and Ethernet switches in buildings and campuses is critical to fully capitalize on the investment in millimeter wave communications.

Millimeter Waves Fixed Wireless

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