Enhancement of 60 GHz Transmission over 802.11ad Using Specular Reflection

Transmission at 60 GHz millimetre wavelengths is often prone to strong signal attenuations and disconnections when-ever objects greater than the wavelength of the propagating signal interrupts the line-of-sight. When this occurs, the network becomes unreliable and its performance is severely affected by unexpected and frequent disconnections, loss of data, retransmissions, waste resources and increased latency. In this work, using commercial 802.11ad chipsets, we show that specular reflection has the potential to circumvent and prevent non-line-of-sight link failures during 60 GHz millimetre wave propagation up to distance of 8m. The data rates presented shows the effectiveness of using specular reflection since utilization is at least 94% of the total bandwidth while less than 4% was either reflected back or absorbed.