Three-dimensional spatial multiplexing for directional millimeter-wave communications in multi-cubicle office environments

Although the 60 GHz millimeter-wave frequency band is very promising for high-throughput multimedia commu-nications, links established with directional antenna in this band are easily blocked by obstacles. In this paper, we incorporate three-dimensional (3D) beamforming techniques to enable 3D spatial multiplexing of millimeter-wave communications in large cubicle office environments where there exists serious signal blockage problem. With 3D beamforming, a wireless link can be established by reflecting a focused beam off a metal-coated ceiling towards the receiver. By modeling the antenna beam with a rectangle-cone-shaped radiation pattern, we derive the “effective coverage district” of both the transmitter and the receiver to calculate interferences between different flows when they operate concurrently. We propose a heuristical concurrent transmission scheduling scheme to exploit the 3D spatial multiplexing for achieving high network throughput while maintaining good fairness among different network nodes. Extensive simulations are conducted under different network density conditions and with different background noise levels to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheduling scheduling scheme for the 3D beamforming 60 GHz network.