Journal of Communications and Networks

The Korean Institute of Commucations and Information Sciences (한국통신학회)
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Exploiting Multi-Hop Relaying to Overcome Blockage in Directional mmWave Small Cells

  • Niu, Yong (State Key Laboratory on Microwave and Digital Communications, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNLIST), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University) ;
  • Gao, Chuhan (State Key Laboratory on Microwave and Digital Communications, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNLIST), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University) ;
  • Li, Yong (State Key Laboratory on Microwave and Digital Communications, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNLIST), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University) ;
  • Su, Li (State Key Laboratory on Microwave and Digital Communications, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNLIST), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University) ;
  • Jin, Depeng (State Key Laboratory on Microwave and Digital Communications, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNLIST), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University)
  • Published : 2016.06.30
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Abstract

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. Through extensive simulations under various traffic patterns and channel conditions, we demonstrate MHRT achieves superior performance in terms of network throughput and connection robustness compared with other existing protocols, especially under serious blockage conditions. The performance ofMHRT with different hop limitations is also simulated and analyzed for a better choice of the maximum hop number in practice.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

Supported by : National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Tsinghua University

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