A New Centralized Access Control Scheme for D2D-Enabled mmWave Networks

In high-density indoor environments (e.g., airports or malls), it is expected an increase in data demand, in the number of applications having stringent Quality-of-Service requirements, and in the number of services among nearby users, such as video sharing or gaming. In order to satisfy these requirements, we adopt D2D communications, 60 GHz band transmissions, and adaptive beamforming techniques. The symbiosis of these technologies provides notable energy saving, high data rate, and strong interference reduction. Despite these benefits, a major issue is the limited communication range, due to the high path loss. To overcome this issue, we consider a Millimeter-Wave Mobile Broadband (MMB) system, consisting of several Access Points interconnected among themselves through a wireless backhaul network. Based on the specific features of the technologies adopted for the considered MMB system, we aim to improve the transmission efficiency, by exploiting concurrent transmissions. Therefore, we propose a new centralized access control scheme which jointly manages D2D communications and transmissions in the access and the backhaul network. Our control strategy aims to maximize the system throughput, to minimize the end-to-end delay, and to improve the fairness among users, while taking into account to keep the computational load as low as possible. To meet these goals, our proposed access control scheme is composed of a data flow management strategy and a multi-criteria scheduling algorithm based on greedy graph vertex-coloring techniques.