ABL: Leveraging Millimeter Wave Pulses for Low Latency IoT Networking

Abstract

There is growing demand for low latency and high reliability wireless control of cyber-physical systems. The utilization of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequency bands, ranging from 30GHz to 300GHz and offering multi-gigahertz of bandwidth, presents a promising approach to enhance network capacity and transmission speeds, thereby diminishing latency. However, despite mm-wave's potential, achieving these rates in realistic application scenarios is challenging due to poor signal propagation caused by factors such as directional antennas, path loss and occlusion. In response, we propose Asynchronous Burst Link (ABL), an innovative multi-hop mesh network architecture which employs symbol-synchronous transmission of mm-wave pulses. This method mitigates transmission errors by using spatially distributed and closely network synchronised relays to enhance coverage, reduce latency, and improve reliability in terms of bit error rate. Our evaluation of ABL involves a simulated 9-node network with a maximum of 8 hops, utilizing 32-bit packets. The results indicate that latency for the most distant node remains under 1 millisecond, while maintaining 99% reliability. Our findings present evidence for the efficacy of novel mm-wave transceiver architectures in meeting the low latency and robustness demands of network services crucial for critical industrial applications.