Millimeter-wave wireless applications offer tremendous advantages over traditional <6GHz wireless.
The wide swaths of available bandwidth enable extremely high data rates to satisfy our ever-growing need for data. The usage of narrow beams enables spatial re-use of spectrum, which further increases network capacity. However, millimeter-wave deployments are faced with several fundamental challenges. Propagation losses are very high at millimeter-waves, and the signal gets easily blocked by foliage, the human body, etc. The performance of electronics degrades as frequency increases, which further exacerbates the challenge of establishing reliable links over reasonable distances. In order to overcome these challenges, deployments use large arrays of antennas, but this drives up the cost and power consumption of the solution.
