  In millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems, narrow beam operations
overcome severe channel attenuations, reduce multiuser interference, and thus
introduce the new concept of noise-limited mmWave wireless networks. The regime
of the network, whether noise-limited or interference-limited, heavily reflects
on the medium access control (MAC) layer throughput and on proper resource
allocation and interference management strategies. Yet, alternating presence of
these regimes and, more importantly, their dependence on the mmWave design
parameters are ignored in the current approaches to mmWave MAC layer design,
with the potential disastrous consequences on the throughput/delay performance.
In this paper, tractable closed-form expressions for collision probability and
MAC layer throughput of mmWave networks, operating under slotted ALOHA and
TDMA, are derived. The new analysis reveals that mmWave networks may exhibit a
non-negligible transitional behavior from a noise-limited regime to an
interference-limited regime, depending on the density of the transmitters,
density and size of obstacles, transmission probability, beamwidth, and
transmit power. It is concluded that a new framework of adaptive hybrid
resource allocation procedure, containing a proactive contention-based phase
followed by a reactive contention-free one with dynamic phase durations, is
necessary to cope with such transitional behavior.
