A heuristic scheduling scheme for directional mmWave WPANs

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications in 60 GHz band have already become a hot topic in wireless communications, and directional medium access control (MAC) protocol is one of the key challenges in 60 GHz communications. In this paper, a heuristic directional MAC protocol was developed, which can fully exploit spatial reuse in mmWave wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The core of the protocol is a heuristic scheduling algorithm, which can compute near-optimal schedules with respect to the transmission delay with low complexity. Simulation results show that comparing with existing protocols, the developed protocol can reduce network delay, while improving network throughput and also having a good fairness performance.