Frame-Based Medium Access Control for 5G Wireless Networks

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications is one of the key technologies for future 5th generation (5G) wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of medium access control (MAC) in mmWave networks. We develop a frame-based scheduling directional MAC protocol, termed FDMAC, to achieve the goal of leveraging collision-free concurrent transmissions to fully exploit spatial reuse in mmWave networks. The high efficiency of FDMAC is achieved by amortizing the scheduling overhead over multiple concurrent, back-to-back transmissions in a row. The core of FDMAC is a graph coloring-based scheduling algorithm, termed greedy coloring (GC) algorithm, that can compute near-optimal schedules with respect to the total transmission time with low complexity. FDMAC is analyzed and evaluated with simulations.