SINR-based scheduling in multi-path multi-hop multi-radio multi-channel mmWave WPANs

Abstract

Abstract Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications is a prospective candidate technology for multi-gigabit rates multimedia applications. To combat the severe propagation attenuation of mmWave, the high gain directional antenna is commonly employed at the nodes. Moreover, exploiting multiple radios over multiple channels is also a promising technology to improve the throughput and delay performance of mmWave communications. In this paper, considering the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) constraint, we develop a multi-path multi-hop multi-radio multi-channel (MPMH-MRMC) concurrent transmission scheduling algorithm to fully exploit spatial reuse in mmWave wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The problem of MPMH-MRMC scheduling is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) to clear all the flows within a minimum number of time slots, which is generally NP-hard. We further propose a heuristic MPMH-MRMC scheme with low computational complexity to solve the problem. Finally, through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that MPMH-MRMC can significantly improve the network performance in terms of network throughput and transmission delay under various traffic patterns.