A Clustering Approach for Multiband Neighbor Discovery on 60 GHz WLAN

The 60 GHz mmWave unlicensed band has a very large spectrum available, divided into four orthogonal channels, which allows up to 7 Gbps data rate. On the other side, the propagation in the 60 GHz band is subject to severe path loss attenuation, which can be mitigated using highly directional antennas. This high directionality brings a new challenge to neighbor discovery; the devices now need to know the exact neighbors’ physical location to successfully communicate with them. In order to expedite the neighbor discovery process, multiband protocols have been proposed in the literature in which a separate band is used for the exchange of control messages in an omnidirectional mode. Nonetheless, these proposals suffer from the control channel bottleneck problem due to the numerous messages that need to be exchanged in this channel. In this work, we propose a scheme that divides the network nodes in clusters and for each cluster we allocate one separate control channel and also a separate mmWave channel for beamforming only. The former separation allows decreasing the number of control messages exchanged in each control channel, and the latter allows the simultaneously execution of multiple beamforming. In conjunction to this clustering scheme, we propose a multiband protocol in which only the cluster leader performs beamforming and uses the control channel to propagate the information obtained during this process. We compare the existing protocols with our proposed clustering protocol in terms of average transmission time, overhead, and accuracy of neighbor discovery information.