Optimal Joint Access Point Placement and Resource Allocation for Indoor mmWave Communications

In this paper, we formulate and solve the optimization problem for joint access point placement and resource allocation for indoor mmWave communications with static users, with a particular focus on airplanes. The proposed scheme obtains the required number of access points (APs) and their locations, for a given data rate threshold and given radio resources such as bandwidth, antenna numbers, and AP cooperation. We first build an airplane cabin environment in a ray-tracing tool to realistically capture the propagation effects. Then, we cast optimal deployment problems considering the performance of different AP cooperation schemes, namely coordinated scheduling (CS), non-coherent joint transmission (NCJT), and coherent joint transmission (C-JT). The results indicate that full cooperation among the APs with C-JT requires fewer APs, especially under high data rate requirements. Comparing the network deployments in the mmWave and sub-6GHz bands, we observe 9 times higher data rates in mmWave although more APs are required.