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mmNets '21: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Workshop on Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Networks and Sensing Systems
n the last decade, major device, communication and networking feats have led to the development and commercialization of millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless technology. Today, wireless local area networks operating in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) 60 GHz frequency band and orchestrated by the IEEE 802.11ad and soon-enough the new IEEE 802.11ay are a reality. Similarly, fifth generation (5G) cellular wide area networks operating in the licensed Frequency Range 2 (FR2) between 24 GHz and 52 GHz (and soon to be extended to 71 GHz) are already deployed in several countries. Higher data-rates (approaching 20 Giga-bits-per-second or Gbps) and lower latencies (approaching few milliseconds) are some of the promises of mmWave technologies to enable long-awaited applications including immersive augmented and virtual reality, the tactile internet, and autonomous unmanned networks, among others, all within different contexts, from entertainment to education to remote work telepresence. Moreover, besides communications, the mmWave spectrum has also enabled exciting applications in the field of wireless sensing, from precise localization and radar, to the extraction of body features for security applications.
Despite the mmWave spectrum spanning the frequency range between 30 GHz and 300 GHz, all the aforementioned commercial technologies and the majority of the research solutions explored to date are for systems operating under 100 GHz. However, this is changing. Today, there are several major academic and industry research initiatives worldwide aimed at developing wireless solutions in the upper mmWave band (100-300 GHz) and the terahertz band (300 GHz to 10 THz, also known as submillimeter waves). When moving to these frequencies, not only there are larger contiguous bands for ultrabroad band communication and networking systems, but electromagnetic radiation interacts with the environment in a more intimate manner, i.e., at the molecular level, giving a whole new meaning to what wireless sensing means. Of course, such exciting opportunities come with several challenges, some of them common for any communication system above 30 GHz, some of them that just become more critical as we move up in the spectrum. The challenges and opportunities span all aspects of wireless technologies, from materials and devices, through propagation and channel modeling, to communication algorithms and networking protocols.
