Fair Scheduling of Concurrent Transmissions in Directional Antenna Based WPANs/WLANs

Abstract

With their capability to support high data rates, millimeter-Wave (mmWave) communications are evolving as a promising and potential technology to support high data rate applications in short range networks. This paper addresses the problem of fair scheduling in mmWave wireless personal and local area networks (WPANs/WLANs) to support applications with varying quality of service (QoS) requirements. To ensure fairness while exploiting the spatial reuse facilitated by directional antennas, concurrent transmission scheduling in mmWave WPANs/WLANs is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Two heuristic schedulers are developed to obtain a schedule in real-time. These schedulers first satisfy the minimum QoS requirements of as many flows as possible, and then, allocate the remaining bandwidth to various flows while ensuring long-term and short-term fairness among the flows. Results from extensive simulations conducted in a dense mmWave WPAN show that the proposed fair schedulers provide better fairness and throughput, compared to existing methods.