MAC layer design for concurrent transmissions in millimeter wave WLANs

High frequency and very high throughput wireless local area networks have turned to be an essential need due to the likely substantial world increase of the WiFi public hotspots and the existing internet traffic. Due to the these challenges, an efficient solution is required for the current IEEE 802.11 standards to meet the predicted growth of wireless traffic and the number of WiFi networks in the world. In this paper, practical and efficient concurrent downlink transmission medium access control (MAC) layer design is proposed for the millimeter wave wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on both the IEEE 802.11ad system and spatial multiplexing technique. Particularly, a pre-defined virtual grouping (PDVG) scheduling approach is designed to schedule concurrent downlink links based on the analog beamforming information of the IEEE 802.11ad. The PDVG approach can attain and select concurrent stations (STNs) with no additional computational overhead. We demonstrate via simulations that the proposed algorithm can enhance the throughput and save the available time of the service period (SP) for the IEEE 802.11ad, without adding extra feedback overhead to the beamforming operation time in the system.