Multimedia content-downloading system using millimeter-wave attached memory

Abstract

This paper presents a high-speed multimedia content-downloading system using 60GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) technology. For a cost-effective solution, the system makes use of conventional 802.11 for the interactive controls between an access point and smart mobile devices, handling such services as access point discovery, authentication, mmWave link establishment, beam steering, and lost packet recovery. The high-speed one-way mmWave link is dedicated to the transfer of content data. The smart mobile device only has an mmWave receiver so that it can keep its power dissipation and hardware costs low. The content data is downloaded from an access point to such a smart mobile device via an external storage component of the mobile device. To use the high bandwidth of the mmWave, the mmWave receiver writes directly to the external storage as a wireless attached memory, which is accessed by the smart mobile device via its SD interface. We built a proof-of-concept prototype with a smartphone receiving data from an mmWave system, and evaluated the performance. © 2012 IEEE.