Efficient and Effective Proactive Scheduling for mmWave WLANs

To cope with growing wireless bandwidth demand, millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has been identified as a promising technology to deliver Gbps throughput. However, due to the susceptibility of mmWave signals to blockage, applications can experience significant performance variability as users move around due to rapid and significant variation in channel conditions. In this context, proactive schedulers that make use of future data rate prediction have potential to bring a significant performance improvement as compared to traditional schedulers. In this work, we propose an efficient proactive algorithm that prioritizes the scheduling of scarce resources to achieve better performance than traditional schedulers. The results show that our scheduler can increase average data rate by up to 20% compared to non-proactive scheduling and achieves from 60% to 75% of the performance gain of an optimal proactive scheduler.