MAC-Layer Concurrent Beamforming Protocol for Indoor Millimeter-Wave Networks

In this paper, we study concurrent beamforming issue for achieving high capacity in indoor millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks. The general concurrent beamforming issue is first formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the sum rates of concurrent transmissions, considering the mutual interference. To reduce the complexity of beamforming and the total setup time, concurrent beamforming is decomposed into multiple single-link beamforming, and an iterative searching algorithm is proposed to quickly achieve the suboptimal transmission/reception beam sets. A codebook-based beamforming protocol at medium access control (MAC) layer is then introduced in a distributive manner to determine the beam sets. Both analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can drastically reduce total setup time, increase system throughput, and improve energy efficiency.