Uplink Beam Management for Millimeter Wave Cellular MIMO Systems with Hybrid Beamforming

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hierarchical beam management scheme for mmWave MIMO systems with hybrid beamforming, improving latency and signal quality in uplink communication under mobility conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-level beam codebook and a dynamic beam training algorithm tailored for efficient uplink beam management in mmWave MIMO systems.

Findings

Significant latency reduction compared to exhaustive search.

Enhanced received signal-to-noise ratio with the proposed scheme.

Effective beam management under mobility conditions.

Abstract

Hybrid analog and digital BeamForming (HBF) is one of the enabling transceiver technologies for millimeter Wave (mmWave) Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems. This technology offers highly directional communication, which is able to confront the intrinsic characteristics of mmWave signal propagation. However, the small coherence time in mmWave systems, especially under mobility conditions, renders efficient Beam Management (BM) in standalone mmWave communication a very difficult task. In this paper, we consider HBF transceivers with planar antenna panels and design a multi-level beam codebook for the analog beamformer comprising flat top beams with variable widths. These beams exhibit an almost constant array gain for the whole desired angle width, thereby facilitating efficient hierarchical BM. Focusing on the uplink communication, we present a novel beam training algorithm with dynamic beam ordering, which is suitable for the stringent latency requirements of the latest mmWave standard discussions. Our simulation results showcase the latency performance improvement and received signal-to-noise ratio with different variations of the proposed scheme over the optimum beam training scheme based on exhaustive narrow beam search.