Enabling On-Demand Low-Power mmWave Repeaters via Passive Beamforming

Advancements in computing have enabled emerging applications such as telesurgery, robot automation, holographic telepresence, and extended reality, which require gigabitper-second throughput, sub-millisecond latency, and highly reliable wireless connectivity. Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology has promised to enable such connectivity by operating over a large bandwidth in the high-frequency spectrum bands (24 GHz and above). However, due to the short wavelength and high directionality of mmWave signals, mmWave networks have limited coverage and are highly susceptible to blockage. In particular, high-data-rate mmWave networks work reliably only when there is a clear line-of-sight (LOS) path between users and base stations. Unfortunately, due to this problem, mmWave networks have not been able to scale and become ubiquitous. Past work has proposed mmWave repeaters and intelligent surfaces to solve this issue by rerouting signal around blockages. However, these solutions are expensive and complex to build, consume high power, or/and require constant feedback from the network to operate since they use active techniques for beam steering. In this paper, we present the first mmWave repeater which uses passive beamforming technique. Our repeater is low-cost, low-power, and can support multiple users simultaneously. Most importantly, it does not require any feedback from the network to operate. Hence, it can be easily deployed on-demand to solve the coverage and blockage problem of mmWave networks whenever and wherever high-data-rate and low-latency connectivity is needed.