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Interference-Aware User Association and Beam Pair Link Allocation in mm-Wave Cellular Networks

IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, pp. 1–7

Abstract

We study the problem of joint user association and beam pair link (BPL) allocation in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) cellular networks. We propose two interference-aware strategies – a centralized and a distributed one – and evaluate their performance based on site-specific directional channel data and realistic antenna models. Our results show that using idealized sectored antenna models severely underestimates the spatial interference, considering the non-negligible sidelobes of realistic antenna arrays which strongly limit the achievable spatial separation of the allocated BPLs in mm-wave networks using beam codebooks. We also show that intra-cell interference is the dominant interference component for all allocated users, in contrast to assumptions in the prior literature. By exploiting non line-of-sight BPLs, our interference-aware strategies achieve significant performance gains over interference-agnostic 5G-NR default user association to the strongest base station and BPL, as well as outperforming a centralized, load-balancing literature benchmark. Our proposed strategies rely solely on downlink 5G-NR reference signals for channel state information updates, making them attractive for practical codebook-based mm-wave cellular networks.

Authors 3

  1. RWTH Aachen University

    Affiliation as printed

    RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems,Aachen,Germany

    Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

  2. RWTH Aachen University

    Affiliation as printed

    RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems,Aachen,Germany

    Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

  3. RWTH Aachen University

    Affiliation as printed

    RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems,Aachen,Germany

    Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

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References 24