With vast amounts of spectrum available in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band, small cells at mmWave frequencies densely deployed underlying the conventional homogeneous macrocell network have gained considerable interest from academia, industry, and standards bodies. Due to high propagation loss at higher frequencies, mmWave communications are inherently directional, and concurrent transmissions (spatial reuse) under low inter-link interference can be enabled to significantly improve network capacity. On the other hand, mmWave links are easily blocked by obstacles such as human body and furniture. In this paper, we develop a multi-hop relaying transmission (MHRT) scheme to steer blocked flows around obstacles by establishing multi-hop relay paths. In MHRT, a relay path selection algorithm is proposed to establish relay paths for blocked flows for better use of concurrent transmissions. After relay path selection, we use a multi-hop transmission scheduling algorithm to compute near-optimal schedules by fully exploiting the spatial reuse. Index Terms: Blockage, heterogeneous cellular networks, MAC scheduling, millimeter wave communications, small cells, 60 GHz. • We design a relay path selection algorithm to choose proper relay nodes for blocked flows, aiming at better use of concurrent transmissions for maximizing transmission efficiency. Since adjacent links sharing common vertices cannot be
The research in REF considered the mmWave small cells systems; the algorithm searched for multi-hop relaying paths to steer the blocked links around obstacles.
Exploiting multi-hop relaying to overcome blockage in directional mmwave small cells
Journal of Communications and Networks
Journal of Communications and Networks
Computer Science