Efficient concurrent transmission scheduling for cooperative millimeter wave systems

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications is a promising technology to provide high data rates (multiGigabit) for indoor multimedia applications. However, indoor mmWave links are highly susceptible to blockage because of the limited ability to diffract around obstacles such as the human body and furniture. In order to realize high-rate reliable transmission, cooperative communication is utilized to tackle with the scenarios where LOS link of source node and destination node is blocked. Specifically, with directional antenna, we first select the node in the feasible region with best achievable rate of cooperative communication as the cooperative relay. Then, cooperative concurrent transmission scheduling is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the transmission efficiency. A flip-based heuristic scheduling algorithm is proposed to obtain the real-time solution. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed cooperative concurrent transmission scheduling (CCTS) scheme can significantly increase the transmission throughput and utilize network resource efficiently while maintaining network connectivity.