Association Control for User Centric Millimeter Wave Communication Systems

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication enables ultra-high rate data transmission in wireless environments, but its performance depends on blockages between the transmitter and receiver significantly. To overcome the blockage problem, we consider two approaches: multi-connectivity and network densification. The multi-connectivity opens up a new paradigm for user centric communication, where each user autonomously chooses multiple base stations (BSs) to attain high quality services. The network densification allows network operators to deploy many BSs in a limited area, thereby providing qualified communication services to users. In this paper, we study user equipment (UE) association control in user centric mmWave communication environments. When a UE arrives, the network provides the UE with information on the resource status of adjacent BSs, and the UE generates a set of candidate BSs. For access control, we formulate two optimization problems that aim to minimize peak load and sum load, respectively. They are non-convex and combinatorial, so their computational complexity grows exponentially with the problem size. As a solution, we develop an access pricing and peak load limit control scheme. Through numerical experiments, we investigate its impact on the performance of mmWave communication systems. The results show that our proposed scheme successfully provides high quality services to users and allocates the network load fairly over the network.