  The millimeter-wave bands have been attracting significant interest as a
means to achieve major improvements in data rates and network efficiencies. One
significant limitation for use of the millimeter-wave bands for cellular
communication is that the communication suffers from much higher path-loss
compared to the microwave bands. Millimeter-wave links have also been shown to
change rapidly, causing links between devices and access points to switch among
line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight and outage states. We propose using Random
Linear Network Coding to overcome the unreliability of individual communication
links in such millimeter-wave systems. Our system consists of devices
transmitting and receiving network-coded packets through several access points.
For downlink communication, network-coded packets are transmitted to a device
via multiple access points. For uplink communication, the access points perform
network coding of packets of several devices, and then send the network-coded
packets to the core network. We compare our approach against a naive approach
in which non-network coded packets are transmitted via multiple access points
("Forwarding" approach). We find that the network coding approach significantly
outperforms the forwarding approach. In particular, network coding greatly
improves the efficiency of the air-interface transmissions and the efficiency
of the backhaul transmissions for the downlink and uplink communication,
respectively.
