  With the explosive growth of mobile demand, small cells in millimeter wave
(mmWave) bands underlying the macrocell networks have attracted intense
interest from both academia and industry. MmWave communications in the 60 GHz
band are able to utilize the huge unlicensed bandwidth to provide multiple Gbps
transmission rates. In this case, device-to-device (D2D) communications in
mmWave bands should be fully exploited due to no interference with the
macrocell networks and higher achievable transmission rates. In addition, due
to less interference by directional transmission, multiple links including D2D
links can be scheduled for concurrent transmissions (spatial reuse). With the
popularity of content-based mobile applications, popular content downloading in
the small cells needs to be optimized to improve network performance and
enhance user experience. In this paper, we develop an efficient scheduling
scheme for popular content downloading in mmWave small cells, termed PCDS
(popular content downloading scheduling), where both D2D communications in
close proximity and concurrent transmissions are exploited to improve
transmission efficiency. In PCDS, a transmission path selection algorithm is
designed to establish multi-hop transmission paths for users, aiming at better
utilization of D2D communications and concurrent transmissions. After
transmission path selection, a concurrent transmission scheduling algorithm is
designed to maximize the spatial reuse gain. Through extensive simulations
under various traffic patterns, we demonstrate PCDS achieves near-optimal
performance in terms of delay and throughput, and also superior performance
compared with other existing protocols, especially under heavy load.
