Relay Assisted Concurrent Scheduling to Overcome Blockage in Full-Duplex Millimeter Wave Small Cells

The millimeter wave (mmWave) has been extensively utilized for its rich spectrum resource. With the development of self-interference (SI) cancellation technology, full-duplex (FD) communications have become possible recently. In order to get larger network capacity, we introduce FD communications into mmWave wireless network. However, mmWave links are easily blocked by obstacles, and the blockage makes some flows fail to be transmitted directly. For the communication problems of shadow coverage area, a relay path selection algorithm is proposed to select optimal multi-hop paths for these blocked flows. This proposed algorithm not only can relay the blocked flows by other unblocked links, but also select the appropriate relay paths to minimize transmission time of the entire transmission process. To further improve the system transmission efficiency, we develop a concurrent scheduling algorithm by using FD communications. The scheduling algorithm continuously schedules the links until the throughput requirements of flows are accommodated. Through extensive simulations at 60 GHz mmWave wireless network, the proposed scheme can solve the problem for a certain degree of blocked flows and complete the transmission with the least time consumption. Compared with other existing schemes, the proposed scheme shows superior performances on relaying capability and scheduling duration.