This paper proposes a novel coding scheme to ensure resilience in millimeter-wave networks, where links are highly sensitive to blockages. The proposed scheme deploys multilevel codes to control the received information and provide different reliability guarantees for different information streams based on their priority. Unlike traditional multilevel coding designs, the proposed scheme maintains low design and operational complexity as the number of paths in the network increases. The achievable rate region of the proposed scheme is characterized and shown to be information-theoretical optimal for the case of two priority levels.

Achieving ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) is critical for the operation of data-intensive applications and for ensuring seamless connectivity. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology is expected to support URLLC by expanding the available spectrum and providing multi-gigabit services. However, a well-recognized challenge is that mmWave communication links are susceptible to blockage, which may lead to communication disruptions. Conventional approaches, such as interleaving and feedback mechanisms provide resilience against such blockages at the cost of incurring additional delay, which may be too large to support URLLC effectively. This calls for novel techniques to develop resilient transmission mechanisms that can support URLLC. This paper develops gracefully resilient transmission mechanisms by deploying multilevel codes over space and over time. These codes allow the control of the received information and they accommodate different quality of service requirements of different information streams. Our evaluations, carried out also within the ns-3 network simulator, show that deploying these codes leads to attractive trade-offs between rate, delay, and outage probability.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum is expected to support data-intensive applications that require ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). However, mmWave links are highly sensitive to blockage, which may lead to disruptions in the communication. Traditional techniques that build resilience against such blockages (among which are interleaving and feed-back mechanisms) incur delays that are too large to effectively support URLLC. This calls for novel techniques that ensure resilient URLLC. In this paper, we propose to deploy multilevel codes over space and over time. These codes offer several benefits, such as they allow to control what information is received and they provide different reliability guarantees for different information streams based on their priority. We also show that deploying these codes leads to attractive trade-offs between rate, delay, and outage probability. A practically-relevant aspect of the proposed technique is that it offers resilience while incurring a low operational complexity.

The interference from active to passive users is a well-recognized challenge in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. We propose a method that enables to limit the interference on passive users (whose presence may not be detected since they do not transmit) with a small penalty to the throughput of active users. Our approach abstracts away (in a simple, yet informative way) the physical layer component and it leverages the directivity of mmWave links and the available network path diversity. We provide linear programming formulations, lower bounds on active users rates, numerical evaluations, and we establish a connection with the problem of (information theoretically) secure communication over mmWave networks.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks support a large variety of applications, particularly delay-sensitive applications by providing high-speed communication. A well-recognized challenge in mmWave communications is that mmWave links are susceptible to blockage and thus, communication may get disrupted. In this paper, we design and evaluate low-complexity proactive transmission mechanisms for mmWave networks that are resilient to such disruptions. Our mechanisms build on the multipath environment and on the existence of accurate models for link blockage probabilities in mmWave networks. We propose the deployment of symmetric multilevel codes across paths to achieve an attractive trade-off between the average information rate and a graceful performance degradation. Our numerical evaluations show that our proposed coding schemes indeed provide a graceful performance degradation compared to alternative schemes (such as erasure correcting codes), while significantly reducing the code complexity compared to traditional multilevel code designs.

Millimeter Wave (mmWave) (and beyond) is expected to play an increasingly important role in our wireless infrastructure by expanding the available spectrum and enabling multi-gigabit services. Despite the promising aspects of mmWave communication, mmWave links are highly sensitive to blockage. In this paper, we develop proactive transmission mechanisms that suitably distribute the traffic across multiple paths in the mmWave network, with the two-fold objective of ensuring resilience against link blockages and achieve high end-to-end packet delivery rate. We present examples of resilience-capacity trade-off curves and show that there exist network topologies for which the worst-case and average approximate capacities are achieved by activating overlapping paths. We also show that this can provide additional benefits, such as decreasing the variance of the achieved rate.

In this paper, we study the problem of optimal topology design in wireless networks equipped with highly-directional transmission antennas. We use the 1-2-1 network model to characterize the optimal placement of two relays that assist the communication between a source-destination pair. We analytically show that under some conditions on the distance between the source-destination pair, the optimal topology in terms of maximizing the network throughput is to place the relays as close as possible to the source and the destination.