Beam Switching Techniques for Millimeter Wave Vehicle to Infrastructure Communications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates beam switching techniques for millimeter wave vehicular communications, proposing a new efficiency metric to optimize beam alignment despite estimation errors caused by vehicle mobility.

Contribution

It introduces a beam design efficiency metric and analyzes parameter tuning to enhance beam alignment accuracy in high-mobility V2I mmWave communications.

Findings

Proposed a new metric for beam design efficiency.

Analyzed the impact of estimation errors on beam alignment.

Provided guidelines for parameter tuning to improve performance.

Abstract

Beam alignment for millimeter wave (mm Wave) vehicular communications is challenging due to the high mobility of vehicles. Recent studies have proposed some beam switching techniques at Road Side Unit (RSU) for vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications, employing initial position and speed information of vehicles, that are sent through Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) to the RSU. However, inaccuracies of the provided information lead to beam misalignment. Some beam design parameters are suggested in the literature to combat this effect. But how these parameters should be tuned? Here, we evaluate the effect of all these parameters, and propose a beam design efficiency metric to perform beam alignment in the presence of the estimation errors, and to improve the performance by choosing the right design parameters.