A Unified Framework for Pushing in Two-Tier Heterogeneous Networks With mmWave Hotspots

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications have attracted substantial attention due to their potential to provide very large bandwidths. Unfortunately, the propagation of millimeter waves suffers from severe path loss and blocking, which limits the coverage of mmWave communication systems. To overcome this, mmWave hotspot empowered two-tier heterogeneous networks are expected to play an important role in the sixth generation (6G) systems. When the deployment of mmWave hotspots is not dense enough, or even sparse, assuring the quality of service (QoS) for mobile users becomes rather challenging. In this paper, we investigate pushing in two-tier heterogeneous networks with mmWave hotspots, in which popular content items are cached by a mobile user when they can be served by a mmWave hotspot. To this end, a unified framework is presented to analyze and optimize the effective throughput of pushing. Based on the effective throughput analysis, pushing policies with different mobility models and/or mmWave hotspot distributions are presented. Both theoretical and numerical results demonstrate the substantial caching gain due to user mobility in mmWave hotspot empowered two-tier networks.