A Protocol for Link Blockage Mitigation in mm-Wave Networks

mm-Wave is a promising technology to meet the enormous bandwidth demands of the future generation cellular networks. This technology has vast amount of unused bandwidth, but has problem of human blockage. Blockage mitigation methods for indoor environments cannot be applied to outdoor scenarios effectively. In this paper, we mitigate human blockage of the mm-Wave technology by proposing an algorithm that provides intelligent user association in mm-Wave networks. The proposed algorithm collects the history blockage incidents throughout the network and exploits the history incidents to associate user equipment to the base station with lower blockage possibility. The blockage incidents happened at different locations in the network. When user equipment attempts to find a base station to associate to, the algorithm examines the history blockage incidents near the location of the user equipment. In this way, the user equipment is associated to a base station that has smaller chance of being blocked. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm is performing better in terms of improving SINR, rate of the links and blockage rate in the network compared to another state-of-the-art user association algorithm designed for mm-Wave networks and common user association algorithms of associating user to closest base station and base station with maximum SINR.