BeamSurfer: Minimalist Beam Management of Mobile mm-Wave Devices

TL;DR

BeamSurfer is a minimalist beam management protocol for indoor mm-wave devices that maintains high signal quality without extra sensors, effectively handling mobility and transient blockages.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, in-band only beam management protocol that does not rely on location or orientation data, suitable for indoor pedestrian scenarios.

Findings

Achieves 96% of optimal beam selection within 3dB.

Effectively recovers from transient LoS blockages using reflected paths.

Operates without additional sensors or location information.

Abstract

Management of narrow directional beams is critical for mm-wave communication systems. Translational or rotational motion of the user can cause misalignment of transmit and receive beams with the base station losing track of the mobile. Reacquiring the user can take about one second in 5G NewRadio systems and significantly impair performance of applications, besides being energy intensive. It is therefore important to manage beams to continually maintain high received signal strength and prevent outages. It is also important to be able to recover from sudden but transient blockage caused by a handor face interposed in the Line-of-Sight (LoS) path. This work presents a beam management protocol called BeamSurfer that is targeted to the use case of users walking indoors near a base station. It is designed to be minimalistic, employing only in-band information, and not requiring knowledge such as location or orientation of the mobile device or any additional sensors. Evaluations under pedestrian mobility show that96%of the time it employs beams that are within3dB of what an omniscient Oracle would have chosen as the pair of optimal transmit-receive LoS beams. It also recovers from transient LoS blockage by continuing to maintain control packet communication over a pre-selected reflected path that preserves time-synchronization with the base station, which allows it to rapidly recover to the LoS link as soon as it is unblocked