BeamSwitch: System Solution for Energy-Efficient Directional Communication on Mobile Devices

Directional communication has the potential to improve the energy efficiency of wireless communication without sacrificing its quality. The authors present a system solution, BeamSwitch, for directional communication on mobile devices. BeamSwitch employs a special multi-antenna system that consists of multiple identical directional antennas1, or beams, a single regular omni-directional antenna, and a single RF chain. It uses one of the directional beams for transmitting data frames and receiving their acknowledgements and the regular antenna for all other transceiving. BeamSwitch tracks the signal strength of incoming frames and selects the right beam for data transmission.