Low-Delay Proactive Mechanisms for Resilient Communication

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks form a core part of a variety of civilian and military applications, particularly delay-sensitive applications by offering high-speed communications. For the promise of these applications, a well-known challenge is that mmWave links are highly sensitive to blockage and communication can get disrupted, especially in military communications. In this paper, we propose and evaluate low-complexity proactive transmission mechanisms that are resilient to network disruptions. Our work leverages the multipath environment and the existence of accurate models that estimate the link blockage probabilities in mmWave networks. We propose to deploy multilevel codes across paths while suitably balancing the average information rate with a graceful performance degradation. We define the rate region to operate along with an optimization formulation to select a high-performing set of rates for the source sequences. Our evaluations show that our proposed coding schemes achieve a graceful performance degradation compared to alternative schemes (such as erasure correcting codes), while significantly reducing the code complexity.