Multi-Hop Concurrent Transmission in Millimeter Wave WPANs with Directional Antenna

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications is a promising enabling technology for high rate (Giga-bit) multimedia applications. However, because oxygen absorption peaks at 60 GHz, mmWave signal power degrades significantly over distance. Therefore, a traffic flow transmitting over multiple short hops is preferred to improve flow throughput. In this paper, we first design a hop selection metric for the piconet controller (PNC) to select appropriate relay hops for a traffic flow, aiming to improve the flow throughput and balance the traffic load across the network. We then propose a multi-hop concurrent transmission (MHCT) scheme to exploit the spatial capacity of the mmWave WPAN. Extensive simulations show that the proposed MHCT scheme can significantly improve the traffic flow throughput and network throughput.