Beamsteering on Mobile Devices: Network Capacity and Client Efficiency

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Abstract
Current and emerging mobile devices are omni directional in wireless communication. Such omni directionality not only limits device energy efficiency but also poses a significant challenge toward the capacity of wireless networks through inter-link interference. In this work, we seek to make mobile clients directional with beamsteering. We first demonstrate that beamsteering is already feasible to mobile devices such as Netbooks and eBook readers in terms of form factor, power efficiency, and device mobility. We further reveal that beamsteering mobile clients face a unique challenge to balance client efficiency and network capacity. There is an optimal operating point for a beamsteering mobile client in terms of the number of antennas and transmit power that achieve the required capacity with lowest power. Finally, we provide a distributed algorithm called BeamAdapt that allows each client to closely approach its optimal point iteratively without central coordination. We also offer a cellular system realization of BeamAdapt. Using Qualnet-based simulation, we show that BeamAdapt with four antennas can reduce client power consumption by 55% while maintaining a required network throughput for a large-scale network, compared to the same network with omni directional mobile clients.
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