Multicast spatial reuse scheduling over millimeter-wave networks

Enhancing throughput gain is an important target in the development of millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. Spatial reuse is an important approach for throughput enhancement, which works well in mmWave networks due to directional links. In addition, multicast transmissions are highly desirable in mmWave systems, and become feasible with recent advances in antenna technology. In this paper, we address the problem of spatial reuse scheduling with multicast transmissions for mmWave communications. We formulate the problem as a Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) problem and propose a low-computational-complexity heuristic algorithm, where potential links are fully utilized to exploit spatial reuse gain by dividing multicast demands into multiple unicast/multicast transmissions. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves near-optimal performance, and obtains high throughput gain with low packet loss rate.