Medium access control protocols for millimeter wave cognitive networks with directional antennas

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Despite ongoing research efforts to develop efficient wireless techniques, wireless networks always eventually face capacity demands exceeding their capabilities. This trend will continue with orders of magnitude expected growth in capacity demands and also an important shift with increasing machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. To properly serve the continuing demands for wireless access, several key technologies are considered by the research community. In this context, this research program specifically contemplates optimizing overall network efficiency with the development and analysis of medium access control (MAC) techniques for future millimeter wave wireless networks where directional antennas are used to mitigate the propagation loss. The vast millimeter wave spectrum then enables multi-fold data rate increase and the efficient deployment of contiguous wireless networks. Furthermore, millimeter wave networks have a number of properties that make operations using dynamic spectrum access (DSA) with cognitive radios a promising approach to efficiently deploy on a per need basis heterogeneous networks to share this vast spectrum. The general objective of this research program is thus to provide and analyze MAC techniques to enable multiple devices clustered in different wireless communication networks, each with various quality of service requirements and capabilities, to efficiently share the broad millimeter wave spectrum. More specifically, sensing techniques considering the use of directional antennas will be developed, dynamic spectrum allocation algorithms for heterogeneous networks and adapted to the reality of millimeter wave communications will be devised, and MAC protocols for heterogeneous multi-band millimeter wave cognitive radios networks with devices equipped with directional antennas, and preferably compatible with network architectures adopted by the industry, will be proposed and analyzed. Optimization tools, heuristics algorithms, and simulation tools will be used in this work to achieve those objectives. Current MAC protocols for millimeter wave wireless networks are generally straightforward adaptations of protocols developed for microwave frequencies and have not been designed taking into account the particularities of the vast millimeter wave spectrum. It is therefore expected that the proposed research project will yield significant research contributions to the growing field of millimeter wireless networks, foreseen as the main approach to provide additional wireless capacity in the future. Those results will be of interest to wireless service providers, equipment manufacturers, standardization organizations and the research community. As such, it should contribute to the successful integration of cognitive millimeter wave radios and directional antenna techniques in future high-speed wireless networks.