Traffic-Aware Coordinated Beamforming for mmWave Backhauling of 5G Dense Networks

We study the problem of downlink Coordinated Beamforming for dense fixed-wireless millimeter wave (mmWave) networks under a Centralized/Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) setting. To compensate for the increased mmWave path loss, we consider directional transmissions via antenna array analog beamforming, which leads to a
discrete
set of available beams. We apply the Lyapunov optimization framework to propose a throughput-optimal policy which explicitly accounts for stochastic traffic and channel fluctuations and dynamically performs joint Base Station-to-user association and analog beam selection. Our model makes minimal assumptions and considers realistic mmWave antenna radiation patterns, while it can be easily extended to include additional MAC and PHY layer controls. Since this flexibility comes at the cost of high computational complexity, we also propose two heuristic policies offering reduced complexity. Their performance is compared against a baseline Round-Robin (RR)-based policy, while a theoretical
worst-case
performance bound is derived. Extensive simulations show the optimal Lyapunov policy achieving a stable throughput increase of more than 2X
per user
compared to the RR policy, while the proposed heuristics incur only a 20-30% performance penalty with respect to the optimal Lyapunov policy with 60X-900X computational time savings.