Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective

By Hossein Shokri Ghadikolaei, Carlo Fischione, Gábor Fodor, Petar Popovski, Michele Zorzi. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2015

377 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multigigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which leads to high directivity gains, fully directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. This paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1bb9eea4d08cbf1b19d7debe407ba8ebe7bd6616

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Citations in the corpus

Millimeter Wave Communications for Future Mobile Networks (2017, methodology): “More recently, there are some recent works emphasize on lower frequencies in ad hoc wireless network scenarios or, more recently, on the 60 GHz IEEE 802.11ad WLAN and WPAN scenarios [214].”
Modeling and Analyzing Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems (2016, background): “Initial beam training and association is a pressing current topic, and recent surveys can be found at [174]–[176], with a comparative study by Qualcomm of different beam forming approaches for initial access appearing in [177].”
User Association in 5G Networks: A Survey and an Outlook (2015, methodology): “The simple user association metric based on the minimum-distance rule [38] may become inefficient, particularly when massive MIMO is applied in macrocells [163].”
A Survey on Hybrid Beamforming Techniques in 5G: Architecture and System Model Perspectives (2018, background): “The virtual cell could dynamically change depending upon the UE traffic load, the channel between BS and UE, and the BS load [174].”
End-to-End Simulation of 5G mmWave Networks (2017, background): “For mmWave systems, E2E design and analysis are at a much earlier stage of research [8]–[10].”
Initial Access in 5G mmWave Cellular Networks (2016, background): “counterparts [6], where each transceiver can look at only one direction per slot.”
Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Communication for Future Wireless Systems: A Survey (2018, background): “adaptive beamforming techniques to suppress interference and use relay stations to circumvent obstacles thereby avoiding blockages [18], [19], [25], [26], as shown in Fig.”
A Survey of Enabling Technologies for Network Localization, Tracking, and Navigation (2018, background): “This unlicensed band is particularly useful for applications such as smart communication environments, smart cities, independent robot navigation, assistive technology, habitat monitoring, vehicular networks, industrial logistics, and medical equipment [279].”