Beamforming Oriented Topology Control for mmWave Networks

Abstract

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is a promising candidate for next generation cellular and wireless networks. To compensate the significantly higher path loss due to the higher frequency, the mmWave band usually uses the beamforming technology. However, this makes the network topology control a great challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for network topology control in mmWave networks, termed Beamforming Oriented tOpology coNtrol (BOON). The objective is to reduce total transmit power of base stations and interference between beams. BOON smartly groups nearby user equipment into clusters, constructs sets from user equipment clusters, and associates user equipment to base stations and beams. We compare BOON with three existing topology control schemes in terms of transmit power, network sum rate, signal to interference and noise ratio, and computation complexity. The results indicate that overall BOON significantly outperforms them. In particular, on average BOON uses only 10, 32, and 25 percent transmit power of other three schemes, respectively, to achieve the same network sum rate.