Performance Analysis of Millimeter-Wave Relaying: Impacts of Beamwidth and Self-Interference

We study the maximum achievable rate of a two-hop amplified-and-forward (AF) relaying millimeter-wave (mm-wave) system, where two AF relaying schemes, i.e., half-duplex (HD) and full-duplex (FD) are discussed. By considering the two-ray mm-wave channel and the Gaussian-type directional antenna, jointly, the impacts of the beamwidth and the self-interference coefficient on maximum achievable rates are investigated. Results show that, under a sum-power constraint, the rate of FD-AF mm-wave relaying outperforms its HD counterpart only when antennas with narrower beamwidth and smaller self-interference coefficient are applied. However, when the sum-power budget is sufficiently high or the beamwidth of directional antenna is sufficiently small, direct transmission becomes the best strategy, rather than the AF relaying schemes. For both relaying schemes, we show that the rates of both AF relaying schemes scale as O(min{θ
_m
^-1
, θ
_m
^-2
}) with respect to beamwidth θ
_m
, and the rate of FD-AF relaying scales as O(μ
^-(1/2)
) with respect to self-interference coefficient μ. Also, we show that ground reflections may significantly affect the performance of mm-wave communications, constructively or destructively. Thus, the impact of ground reflections deserves careful considerations for analyzing or designing future mm-wave wireless networks.