Leveraging Sensing at the Infrastructure for mmWave Communication

TL;DR

This paper explores how infrastructure-mounted sensors in smart cities can reduce configuration overhead in mmWave vehicle-to-everything communication, enabling high data-rate applications like infotainment and augmented reality.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of using infrastructure sensors to assist mmWave communication, supported by numerical and measurement results demonstrating reduced array configuration overhead.

Findings

Infrastructure sensors decrease mmWave array training overhead.

Numerical and measurement results validate the approach.

Future research directions are outlined for practical implementation.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication in the mmWave band is one way to achieve high data-rates for applications like infotainment, cooperative perception, and augmented reality assisted driving etc. MmWave communication relies on large antennas arrays, and configuring these arrays poses high training overhead. In this article, we motivate the use of infrastructure mounted sensors (which will be part of future smart cities) for mmWave communication. We provide numerical and measurement results to demonstrate that information from these infrastructure sensors reduces the mmWave array configuration overhead. Finally, we outline future research directions to help materialize the use of infrastructure sensors for mmWave communication.