Coordinated Beamforming for Millimeter-wave Terrestrial Peer-to-Peer Communication Networks

Terrestrial mobile peer-to-peer millimeter wave networks will likely use beamforming arrays with narrow beams. Aligning narrow beams is difficult. One consideration for aligning narrow beams is co-channel interference. Beams can be aligned either on a per-link basis where co-channel interference is ignored, or on a global basis where co-channel interference is considered. One way to align beams on a global basis is coordinated beamforming. Coordinated beamforming can be defined as alignment of beams on a global basis, so as to jointly optimize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of all links operating in a network. In this work, we explore coordinated beamforming in peer-to-peer networks and demonstrate its efficacy. Networks with varying numbers of links are simulated in scenarios with and without obstructions. The coordinated beamforming schemes presented in this work significantly improve link SINR statistics in these scenarios. Greater improvement was found in networks with higher numbers of links and in networks in terrain with obstructions.