Antenna subarray management for hybrid beamforming in millimeter-Wave mesh backhaul networks

Wireless mesh networking using millimeter-Wave (mmWave) bands provides a promising option for connecting densely deployed small base stations (BSs) to the core network. To fully exploit the potential of both wireless mesh networking and mmWave communications, hybrid beamforming is indispensable to help maintain connections with multiple neighbors, while providing directional antenna gain for BSs in mmWave mesh backhaul networks (MMBNs). Hybrid beamforming can form multiple directional links and each consists of a number of antenna subarrays. In this paper, we study the antenna subarray management problem for hybrid beamforming in MMBNs. To this end, a joint static and dynamic subarray scheduling (SDSS) scheme is developed to simultaneously achieve high-throughput performance and fluctuation-adaptive capability for each backhaul link. Specifically, static subarrays are jointly allocated with transmit power on a large time scale. Based on the static subarray allocation, dynamic subarrays are scheduled on a small time scale. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified via extensive simulations. Compared to other nonadaptive schemes, our scheme reduces the total power consumption and packet delivery delay significantly while satisfying the capacity demand of each backhaul link. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.