Mitigation of beam blocking in mmWave indoor WPAN using dynamic control delegation based approach

Abstract

The mmWave band of frequencies suffer from very poor diffraction capabilities which results in their high susceptibility towards beam blocking. Thus, the devices connected on a mmWave based communication network can communicate only through their line-of-sight (LoS) neighbors which makes it difficult for their deployment in indoor environments (e.g. residential households, offices etc). Additionally, the presence of non-stationery member nodes can create further difficulties in maintaining stable LoS links. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach involving dynamic control delegation (DCD) by a piconet controller to mitigate the problem of beam blocking. We propose some delegation based techniques which can be used by a piconet controller to address the problems of beam blocking and link instability to a significant extent. Finally, we validate our claim by evaluating the performance of the proposed techniques over different network scenarios.