Millimeter-wave multimedia communications: challenges, methodology, and applications

The worldwide opening of a massive amount of unlicensed millimeter-wave spectrum has triggered great interest in developing high-bit-rate multimedia services and applications. Specific challenges for mmWave communication design include large-scale attenuation, atmospheric absorption, phase noise, limited gain amplifiers, and so on. This article aims to define and evaluate important metrics to characterize multimedia QoS and jointly takes these technical challenges into account in the framework of mmWave. To this end, we design a QoS-aware multimedia scheduling scheme to achieve the trade-off between performance and complexity, in which accurate propagation analysis is carried out and suitable countermeasure techniques are pointed out to satisfy the QoS requirements. Moreover, potential multimedia applications are analyzed and possible solutions provided. Illustrative results indicate that the proposed multimedia scheduling scheme can perform efficiently in a practical mmWave communication system.