Good neighbor distributed beam scheduling in coexisting multi-RAT networks

Spectrum sharing and employing highly directional antennas in the mm-wave bands are considered among the key enablers for 5G networks. Conventional interference avoidance techniques like listen-before-talk (LBT) may not be efficient for such coexisting networks. In this paper, we address a coexistence mechanism by means of distributed beam scheduling with minimum cooperation between spectrum sharing subsystems without any direct data exchange between them. We extend a “Good Neighbor” (GN) principle initially developed for decentralized spectrum allocation to the distributed beam scheduling problem. To do that, we introduce relative performance targets, develop a GN beam scheduling algorithm, and demonstrate its efficiency in terms of performance/complexity trade off compared to that of the conventional selfish (SLF) and recently proposed distributed learning scheduling (DLS) solutions by means of simulations in highly directional antenna mm-wave scenarios.