A cross-layer design for a software-defined millimeter-wave mobile broadband system

Abstract

Heterogeneous networks, which deploy small cells in the mmWave band underlying the macrocell network, have attracted intense interest from both academia and industry. Different from the communication systems using lower carrier frequencies, mmWave communications have unique features, such as high propagation loss, directional communications, and sensitivity to blockage. Aiming to overcome the challenging problems in mmWave networks, such as interference management, spatial reuse, anti-blockage, QoS guarantee, and load balancing, we architecturally borrow the ideas of heterogeneous cloud radio access networks and software-defined networking to propose a software-defined mmWave mobile broadband system via a cross-layer design approach. In this architecture, a centralized controller is introduced by abstracting the control functions from the network layer to the physical layer. Through quantitative simulations in a realistic indoor scenario, we demonstrate the performance advantages of our system in terms of network throughput and flow throughput. This work is the first cross-layer and software-defined design for mmWave communications, which opens up an opportunity for mmWave communications to make a significant impact on future 5G networks.