Multi-Beam Transmission and Dual-Band Cooperation for Control/Data Plane Decoupled WLANs.

With dramatically increased data traffic, the traditional low-frequency (LF) wireless local area networks (WLAN) are facing several difficulties, particularly, limited available spectrum resources and low network efficiency. While the use of millimeter-wave (mmWave) could bring more spectrum, WLAN in high-frequency (HF) suffers poor reliability. In addition, the current distributed WLAN architecture and the coupled data and control planes lead to inefficient management and poor performance with increased network scale, which cannot meet the stringent requirements from diverse applications. In overcoming these difficulties, the control plane and data plane decoupled network architecture and sub-6 GHz and mmWave dual-band cooperation are considered to be the critical solutions to improve the system performance in 5th-Generation (5G) and beyond networks. Therefore, to improve the throughput and reliability of the future WLAN, we propose a control plane and data plane decoupled WLAN architecture in this paper that supports both sub-6 GHz and mmWave based on the existing control plane and data plane decoupled WLAN concept. Furthermore, new multi-beam transmission and sub-6 GHz and mmWave dual-band cooperation mechanisms are developed to improve the throughput and reliability in our proposed WLAN architecture. Performance analysis and simulation show that with the multi-beam transmission and sub-6 GHz and mmWave dual-band cooperation mechanisms in our proposed WLAN architecture, throughput and reliability are both significantly improved when compared with the traditional distributed WLAN architecture and operation mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]