Reversing the Curse of Densification in mmWave Networks Through Spatial Multiplexing

Abstract

The gold standard of a wireless network is that the throughput increases linearly with the density of access points (APs). However, such a linear throughput gain is suspended in the 5G mmWave network mainly due to the short communication distances in mmWave bands and the dense deployments of mmWave APs. As being operated in the interference-limited regime, the aggregate interference resulted from the increasing mmWave APs will gradually become the network performance bottleneck, which leads to the saturation of the throughput. In this paper, we propose to overcome the densification plateau of a mmWave network by employing spatial multiplexing at APs. To study the effect of spatial multiplexing on mmWave networks, we first derive the coverage probability as a function of spatial multiplexing gain. The fixed-rate coding scheme is then used to provide the network throughput. We also introduce the concept of densification gain to capture the improvement in network throughput achieved through the AP densification. Our results indicate that without the spatial multiplexing at APs, the throughput of mmWave networks will reach the plateau when the density of APs becomes sufficiently large. By enabling the spatial multiplexing at APs, however, the mmWave network can continuously harvest the throughput gains as the number of APs grows. By deriving the upper bound for the throughput of mmWave networks, we quantify the potential throughput improvement as the spatial multiplexing gain increases. However, our numerical results show that such a potential throughput gain cannot be explored by the fixed-rate coding scheme. We then demonstrate the necessity for deploying the multi-rate coding scheme in mmWave networks, especially when the spatial multiplexing gain at mmWave APs is large.