A Blind Beam Tracking Scheme for Millimeter Wave Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a blind beam tracking scheme for millimeter-wave systems that significantly reduces training overhead using a particle filter-based algorithm, enhancing performance in dynamic mobile scenarios.

Contribution

A novel beamforming codebook design and a blind beam tracking algorithm based on particle filters for millimeter-wave systems in mobile environments.

Findings

Reduces beam training overhead by over 80%.

Effective in dynamic mobile scenarios.

Improves link reliability and throughput.

Abstract

Millimeter-wave is one of the technologies powering the new generation of wireless communication systems. To compensate the high path-loss, millimeter-wave devices need to use highly directional antennas. Consequently, beam misalignment causes strong performance degradation reducing the link throughput or even provoking a complete outage. Conventional solutions, e.g. IEEE 802.11ad, propose the usage of additional training sequences to track beam misalignment. These methods however introduce significant overhead especially in dynamic scenarios. In this paper we propose a beamforming scheme that can reduce this overhead. First, we propose an algorithm to design a codebook suitable for mobile scenarios. Secondly, we propose a blind beam tracking algorithm based on particle filter, which describes the angular position of the devices with a posterior density function constructed by particles. The proposed scheme reduces by more than 80% the overhead caused by additional training sequences.