An anti-blocking scheme with spatial reuse for mmWave wireless networks

In this paper, we investigate the two unique features of 60GHz mmWave links: inherent directivity and susceptible to blockage of human body. Due to the narrowed transmission beam of directional antenna, a moving human may cause link breakage and degradation. A fast relay selection and STDMA scheduling scheme is proposed to maintain the stability of the mmWave links and maximize the overall throughput in the presence of relay. We evaluate the anti-blocking scheme through MATLAB simulations, and compare it with existing scheduling algorithm without relay operation. The results show that the proposed scheme solves the problem of human blockage by the use of relay, and achieves high system throughput at the same time owing to the support for spatial reuse in scheduling time slots.