Outage reduction with joint scheduling and power allocation in 5G mmWave cellular networks

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications is a promising technology which supports high datarates (multi-Gbps) by utilizing high bandwidth and the directional antenna. While the directionality reduces interference significantly and compensates the high propagation loss, it brings about two major problems. Firstly, mmWave links are easily blocked by obstacles like human bodies and buildings. Secondly, user mobility can frequently cause misalignments between transmitter and receiver beams, which is known as the deafness problem. In this paper, these problems are addressed and a joint scheduling and power allocation framework is proposed to reduce the outage probability during user movement. Extensive simulations are done to demonstrate the pros and cons of the proposed algorithms and the improvement of system performance.