A Stable Link Allocation Algorithm for 5G Millimeterwave Networks

Stability of allocated transmission paths is often an overlooked problem in the domain of millimeterwave communication. With ever increasing demand for high speed communication, comes the need for allocating stable links. The quality of an allocated transmission path depends not only upon the present time, but also upon the maintenance of the said path in the near future; the fragile nature of millimeter waves necessitates this. Millimeterwaves suffer from unusually high attenuation, through free space, and especially through obstacles. In this paper, we propose a simple idea to allocate relay-disjoint transmission paths which are likely to maintain a valid transmissibility criterion in the near future. In other words, we counter intuitively select a path that gives a less than optimal data rate, while giving a more stable link, which in turn reduces unnecessary handoffs, and thereby avoids subsequent redundant link selection overhead. We show that the problem is NP-complete, and propose a greedy algorithm to solve it. We compare our approach with a traditional received signal strength (RSS) based approach, and show that our method outperforms it by a considerable amount, especially when users do not change their velocity and directions very frequently.