Abstract
Merging mobile edge computing (MEC) service with the wireless local area networks (WLANs) provides enormous benefits such as intensive computation capabilities. Access to high-speed WLANs has become an urgent challenge due to the fast rate of application development and user adoption. Providing increased wireless resources is one solution, but millimeter (mmWave) multi-user massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology has also attracted attention due to a series of features such as high throughput, strong anti-interference ability, and small fading. Hence, exploring the potential of mmWave MIMO systems for WLAN could play a significant role in improving network performance, especially throughput. In this paper, we introduce mmWave and massive MIMO into traditional WLAN with MEC, which enables a large portion of spatial resources to be allocated among users, and mitigates inter-user interference. Moreover, we propose a novel media access control (MAC) protocol, named as LSMWN-MAC, to adapt to a series of unique characteristics of mmWave and massive MIMO, which adopts space division multiple access (SDMA) as one of the resource methods, taking full advantage of spatial resources. In addition, we modify the protocol and propose the MLSMWN-MAC protocol to allocate resources dynamically, a solution that is particularly suitable for scenes with 30-50 users. Simulation results show that compared to 802.11ad, the proposed two protocols can increase the saturated throughput by 4.7Gb/s and 5.4Gb/s respectively, which are close to the throughput upper limit of the mmWave MIMO system. Meanwhile, we observe that when the number of users exceeds the threshold, the performance of the LSMWN-MAC protocol using a static allocation method is superior to the MLSMWN-MAC protocol using a dynamic method. In other cases, the dynamic protocol has better performances.
Highlights
Booming high-speed applications (such as 4K video, virtual reality (VR), remote surgery, and remote-controlled slave robots) have extremely strict requirements on the high-data rate of a network, which places an enormous burden on a current wireless local area network(WLAN)
In order to solve these problems, we propose a large-scale Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) based wireless network media access control (MAC) (LSMWN-MAC) protocol, a multi-user MAC protocol of wireless network based on millimeter wave (mmWave) massive MIMO, which is suitable for the wireless local area networks (WLANs) that accommodates mobile edge computing (MEC) services, especially when the number of users is large
We propose using space division multiple access (SDMA) combined with frequency division multiple access (FDMA) in MAC layer to transmit data, so multiple downlink data can be transmitted in parallel, to make full use of spatial resources for mmWave systems in order to increase the number of downlink users and improve downlink throughput
Summary
Booming high-speed applications (such as 4K video, virtual reality (VR), remote surgery, and remote-controlled slave robots) have extremely strict requirements on the high-data rate of a network, which places an enormous burden on a current wireless local area network(WLAN). Due to the expectation of high-speed communication between the cloud and the devices, it is a challenge to design a MAC-layer protocol based on mmWave massive MIMO systems to get better performance of scheduling and resources allocation. We propose using SDMA combined with FDMA in MAC layer to transmit data, so multiple downlink data can be transmitted in parallel, to make full use of spatial resources for mmWave systems in order to increase the number of downlink users and improve downlink throughput. The mmWave massive MIMO system can greatly improve physical performance at the expense of increasing antenna cost This is a promising way to introduce the massive MIMO technology into WLAN, in order to improve the MAC-layer channel capacity
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