Hierarchical Beamforming: Resource Allocation, Fairness and Flow Level Performance
This work addresses the need for efficient resource allocation and performance analysis in hierarchical beamforming for wireless networks, but the results are incremental as they extend existing fairness concepts to a specific beamforming architecture.
The paper proposes computationally efficient algorithms for fair rate allocation in hierarchical beamforming and provides closed-form formulas for flow-level performance of elastic and streaming traffic. Numerical experiments show low complexity compared to conventional beamforming, suggesting it as a promising candidate for future cellular networks.
We consider hierarchical beamforming in wireless networks. For a given population of flows, we propose computationally efficient algorithms for fair rate allocation including proportional fairness and max-min fairness. We next propose closed-form formulas for flow level performance, for both elastic (with either proportional fairness and max-min fairness) and streaming traffic. We further assess the performance of hierarchical beamforming using numerical experiments. Since the proposed solutions have low complexity compared to conventional beamforming, our work suggests that hierarchical beamforming is a promising candidate for the implementation of beamforming in future cellular networks.