Interference-Aware User Association and Beam Pair Link Allocation in mm-Wave Cellular Networks

We study the problem of joint user association and beam pair link (BPL) allocation in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) cellular networks. We propose two interference-aware strategies – a centralized and a distributed one – and evaluate their performance based on site-specific directional channel data and realistic antenna models. Our results show that using idealized sectored antenna models severely underestimates the spatial interference, considering the non-negligible sidelobes of realistic antenna arrays which strongly limit the achievable spatial separation of the allocated BPLs in mm-wave networks using beam codebooks. We also show that intra-cell interference is the dominant interference component for all allocated users, in contrast to assumptions in the prior literature. By exploiting non line-of-sight BPLs, our interference-aware strategies achieve significant performance gains over interference-agnostic 5G-NR default user association to the strongest base station and BPL, as well as outperforming a centralized, load-balancing literature benchmark. Our proposed strategies rely solely on downlink 5G-NR reference signals for channel state information updates, making them attractive for practical codebook-based mm-wave cellular networks.