OpenMili: a 60 GHz software radio platform with a reconfigurable phased array antenna
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.
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