On Link Scheduling in Dual-Hop 60-GHz mmWave Networks

We tackle the problem of minimizing the maximum expected delivery time of all transmission pairs in 60 GHz mmWave networks. The network is dual-hop with multiple transmitter-receiver pairs, relays, and a centralized controller (termed PicoNet coordinator). We jointly optimize relay and link selection for the transmitter-receiver pairs to minimize delivery time, while the reflected non-line-of-sight transmission links are exploited to get around obstacles. To reduce computational complexity, we develop a decomposition principle to transform the joint-optimization problem into a link selection subproblem and a relay assignment subproblem when there are a sufficient amount of relays. A tight performance bound for the proposed algorithm is proved. We also develop a heuristic scheme to handle the case when there are no enough relays. The superior performance of our proposed algorithms is validated with extensive simulations and comparisons with benchmark schemes.