AoI-Based Opportunistic-Fair mmWave Schedulers

We consider a system with a Base Station (BS) and multiple mobile/stationary users. BS uses millimeter waves (mmWaves) for data transmission and hence needs to align beams in the directions of the end-users. The idea is to avail regular user-position estimates, which help in accurate beam alignment towards multiple users, paving way for opportunistic mmWave schedulers. We propose an online algorithm that uses a dual opportunistic and fair scheduler to allocate data as well as position-update channels, in each slot. Towards this, well-known alpha-fair objective functions of utilities of various users, which further depend upon the age of position-information, are optimized. We illustrate the advantages of the opportunistic scheduler, by comparing it with the previously proposed mmWave schemes; these schedulers choose one user in each slot and start data transmission only after accurate beam alignment. We also discuss two ways of introducing fairness in such schemes, both of which perform inferior to the proposed age-based opportunistic scheduler.