OpenMili: A 60 GHz Software Radio Platform With A Reconfigurable Phased-array Antenna

Abstract

The 60 GHz wireless technology holds great potential for multi-Gbps communications and high-precision radio sensing. But the lack of an accessible experimental platform has been impeding its progress. In this paper, we overcome the barrier with OpenMili, a reconfigurable 60 GHz radio architecture. OpenMili builds from off-the-shelf FPGA processor, data converters and 60 GHz RF front-end. It employs customized clocking, channelization and interfacing modules, to achieve Gsps sampling bandwidth, Gbps wireless bit-rate, and Gsps sample streaming from/to a PC host. It also incorporates the first programmable, electronically steerable 60 GHz phased-array antenna. OpenMili adopts programming models that ease development, through automatic parallelization inside signal processing blocks, and modular, rate-insensitive interfaces across blocks. It provides common reference designs to bootstrap the development of new network protocols and sensing applications. We verify the effectiveness of OpenMili through benchmark communication/sensing experiments, and showcase its usage by prototyping a pairwise phased-array localization scheme, and a learning-assisted real-time beam adaptation protocol.