A Novel Fairness Allocation Strategy With Minimum Mainlobe Interference for mmWave Networks

Abstract

In the fifth-generation (5G) communication system, millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology brings superior capabilities, such as higher capacity, lower latency, and a flexible beamforming structure. The interference management strategies play an important role in mmWave beamforming networks to support the multibeam operation and maximize the overall data rates for user equipments (UEs). Currently, most of the existing research do not jointly consider designs, including the mainlobe interference (MI) avoidance and resource blocks (RBs) fairness allocation. In this article, a novel fairness allocation strategy is proposed to achieve the minimum MI and a fair RB assignment for mmWave networks. To achieve the minimum MI, an MI mitigation (MIM) algorithm is designed to maximize the data rate for each UE. With the adaptive mini-timeslot design, the MIM algorithm can achieve MI cancelation for all UEs at each identical timeslot and beam. To combine MIM and fairness for RB allocation among all UEs, the MIM-fairness allocation (MIM-FA) algorithm is also presented. Based on a novel mini-timeslot with designed multiple frames, the MIM-FA algorithm can simultaneously guarantee the fairness among all UEs and mitigate MI at each mini-timeslot for each beam. Additionally, the MIM-FA algorithm can be verified that it achieves the maximum user data rate with the identical number of RBs under the lowest number of frames. Simulation results validate that the proposed MIM and MIM-FA algorithms can provide a higher data rate and better fairness for different scenarios compared to current state-of-the-art competitive approaches.