Maximum Throughput Path Selection With Random Blockage for Indoor 60 GHz Relay Networks

Indoor communications in the 60 GHz band is capable of supporting multi-gigabit wireless access thanks to the abundant spectrum and the possibility of using dense antenna arrays. However, the high directivity and penetration loss make it vulnerable to blockage events, which can be frequent in indoor environments. Given network topology information in sufficient precision, we investigate the average throughput and outage probability when the connection between any two nodes can be established either via the line-of-sight (LOS) link, through a reflection link, or by a half-duplex relay node. We model the reflection link as an LOS with extra power loss and derive the closed-form expression for the relative reflection loss. For networks with a central coordinator and multiple relays, we also propose a generic algorithm, maximum throughput path selection (MTPS), to select the optimal path that maximizes the throughput. The complexity of the MTPS algorithm is O(n²) for networks equipped with n relays, whereas a brute-forced algorithm has complexity of O(n · n!). Numerical results show that increasing the number of relays can significantly increase the average throughput and decrease the outage probability, and resorting to reflection paths provides significant gains when the probability of link blockage is high.