Tunable reflectors enabled environment augmentation for better mmWave WLANs

With significant commercial potentials, millimeter-wave (mmWave) based wireless local area networks (WLANs) have attracted intensive attention lately. Unfortunately, the susceptible transmission characteristics over mmWave bands, especially the vulnerability to blockages, poses significant design challenges. Although existing solutions, such as beamforming, can overcome some of the problems, they usually focus on enhancing end transceivers to adapt to the transmission environments, and sometimes are still less effective. In this paper, by deploying highly-reflective cheap metallic plates as tunable reflectors without damaging the aesthetic nature of the environments, we propose to augment WLAN transmission environments in a way to create more effective alternative indirect line-of-sight (LOS) links by adjusting the orientations of the reflectors. Based on this idea, we design a novel adaptive mechanism, called mmRef, to effectively tune the angels of the deployed reflectors and develop corresponding operational procedures. Our performance study demonstrates our proposed scheme could achieve significant gain by tuning the angles of deployed reflectors in the augmented transmission environment.