Multimedia Content Delivery in Millimeter Wave Home Networks

Millimeter wave (mm-wave) communication is a promising technology for short-range communications and high-speed services. It provides potential solutions for multimedia content delivery in home networks. However, approaches for resource allocation in traditional wireless networks may not be efficient for multimedia data transmissions in mm-wave networks. This is due to the very wide bandwidth and highly directional transmissions, which bring challenges as well as opportunities to the resource allocation of mm-wave transmissions. In this paper, we first characterize different usage scenarios of multimedia content delivery by introducing a set of utility functions. We then formulate a joint power and channel allocation problem based on a network utility maximization framework, which captures the spatial and frequency reuse of mm-wave communications. The formulated problem is a non-convex mixed integer programming (MIP) problem. We reformulate the problem into a convex MIP problem and propose a resource allocation algorithm based on outer approximation (OA) method. We further develop an efficient heuristic algorithm, which has a lower complexity than the OA based algorithm. Simulation results present the tradeoffs between the OA based and heuristic algorithms for different scenarios and show that our proposed algorithms substantially outperform recently proposed schemes in the literature.