Wireless networks operating in the 60 GHz band have the potential to provide very high throughput but face a number of challenges (e.g., high attenuation, beam training, and coping with mobility) which are widely accepted but often not well understood in practice. Understanding these challenges, and especially their actual impact on consumer-grade hardware is fundamental to fully exploit the high physical layer rates in the 60 GHz band. To this end, we perform an extensive measurement campaign using two commercial off-the-shelf 60 GHz routers in real-world environments. Our results allow us to revisit a range of issues and provide much deeper insights into the reasons for specific performance compared to prior work on performance characterization. Further, our study goes beyond basic link characterization and explores for the first time practical considerations such as coverage and access point deployment. While some of our observations are expected, we also obtain highly surprising insights that challenge the prevailing wisdom in the community. We derive the shortcomings of current commercial 60 GHz devices, and the fundamental problems that remain open on the way to fast and efficient 60 GHz networking.

Wireless networks operating in the 60 GHz band have the potential to provide very high throughput but face a number of challenges (e.g., high attenuation, beam training, and coping with mobility) which are widely accepted but often not well understood in practice. Understanding these challenges, and especially their actual impact on consumer-grade hardware is fundamental to fully exploit the high physical layer rates in the 60 GHz band. To this end, we perform an extensive measurement campaign using two commercial off-the-shelf 60 GHz routers in practical real-world environments. Our study is centered around two fundamental adaptation mechanisms in 60 GHz networks-beam training and rate control- whose interactions are key for performance. Understanding these interactions allows us to revisit a range of issues and provide much deeper insights into the reasons for specific performance compared to prior work on performance characterization. Further, our study goes beyond basic link characterization and explores for the first time practical considerations such as coverage and access point deployment. While some of our observations are expected, we also obtain highly surprising insights that challenge the prevailing wisdom in the community.

This work conducts one of the first experimental studies of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) in dual-band 60 GHz/5 GHz WLANs using off-the-shelf hardware. We consider both uncoupled and different coupled congestion control algorithms, compare their performance and their potential to improve throughput over single path TCP, and uncover their limitations. In contrast to a recent study that reports reduced throughput with MPTCP compared to single path TCP over 60 GHz, our results show that significant performance improvements are possible, especially in the case of uncoupled congestion control. On the other hand, performance gains with coupled congestion control are lower as these algorithms often fail to fully utilize the capacity of both paths simultaneously. We also observe a pathological case that can lead to significantly reduced throughput with MPTCP regardless of the congestion control algorithm.