Transmit and receive beamforming for 60-GHz physical-layer multicasting

Multicast services are highly desirable in 60-GHz millimeter-wave communications, but multicast beamforming remains a challenge due to special structure of high frequency system. To solve this problem, a transmit and receive multicast beamforming scheme has been proposed in this paper. Unlike conventional multicast models in LTE/EMBMS, every device in proposed system is equipped with a multi-antenna array, which helps enhance beam directivity and reduce interference. Two stages are put forward to generate transmit and receive beams for multicasting. Performance evaluations have shown that the total throughput of the network has been improved largely by using the proposed scheme compared with unicast beamforming. Additionally, the designed algorithm has a minor performance loss compared with previous quasi-optimal algorithm, but with much lower complexity, which makes it advantageous for practical use.