Using Coalition Games for QoS Aware Scheduling in mmWave WPANs

With the increasing quality of service (QoS) demands for indoor multimedia applications, millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are emerging as a promising candidate for the wireless personal area networks (WPANs). On the one hand, it has the advantage of providing several-Gbps transmission rate. However, due to the unique characteristics in 60-GHz frequency band, such as high propagation loss, beamforming is fully exploited for mmWave links to achieve directional transmission and reception. In this paper, we propose a novel QoS aware scheduling algorithm for concurrent transmission in mmWave WPANs based on coalition game. First, we formulate the problem of concurrent transmission scheduling into a non-convex integer programming problem. Then, we propose a coalition game based algorithm to maximize the number of flows satisfying the corresponding QoS requirements, while improving the network resource utilization effectively. Besides, our proposed algorithm converges to a Nash-stable equilibrium with greatly reduced complexity. Through extensive simulations under various system parameters, we demonstrate our scheme achieves better network performance in terms of the throughput and the number of flows scheduled successfully, compared with existed protocols.