Systematic Beam Management in mmWave Networks: Tradeoff Among Beam Coverage, Link Budget, and Interference Control

In this paper, we study the beam management problem in mmWave networks from a systematic perspective. Instead of maximizing the network performance in terms of user sum-rate, we improve the beam coverage, which could potentially reduce beam tracking overhead for mobile users. Moreover, to compensate the severe signal attenuation in mmWave bands, we configure the beam to meet the user link budget requirement. To reduce the interference among users, we take the inter-beam interference from both main-lobe and side-lobe into consideration. Overall, we formulate our beam management scheme as a non-linear integer optimization problem. By deliberately transforming it to a geometric optimization problem and designing a rounding method, we develop a suboptimal solution, with low computational complexity. Based on this, we further design a scheduling user set refining method, which can assist user scheduling in the MAC layer, to make the beam configuration request within the antenna capability. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm could manage the beam on-line, while satisfying beam configuration requests for beam coverage, link budget, and inter-beam interference control.