Blockage Aware Fair Scheduling with Differentiated Service Support in mmWave WPANs/WLANs

Millimeter Wave (mmWave) communications are evolving as a potential and promising technology to address the ever increasing mobile data rate requirements. This paper addresses fair scheduling in directional antenna based mmWave wireless personal and local area networks with non-uniform traffic demand. Due to their small wavelength, mmWave signals are susceptible to blockage. The proposed fair schedulers handle the link blockage problem through relaying, and are capable of providing end-to-end fair bandwidth allocation to relay flows. To achieve differentiated and fair service allocation to various regions of the network while using only limited flow related information, a service tag based scheduler is proposed in this paper. Then, the performance bounds on the minimum throughput and unfairness of this scheduler are obtained. To approximate the performance of the service tag based scheduler while minimizing the control overhead, a heuristic fair scheduler is also proposed. Results from extensive simulations conducted in a mmWave WPAN deployed to support high data rate applications show the performance advantages of the proposed schedulers, compared to existing fair schedulers, in terms of throughput and fairness.