Look Once, Beam Twice: Camera-Primed Real-Time Double-Directional mmWave Beam Management for Vehicular Connectivity

TL;DR

This paper introduces VIBE, a hybrid learning architecture that uses camera sensing to enable real-time, reliable mmWave beam management for vehicular connectivity, reducing latency and improving link stability.

Contribution

VIBE combines machine learning, model-based reasoning, and RF feedback to enhance beam alignment efficiency and generalization in dynamic vehicular environments.

Findings

VIBE achieves outage rates as low as 1.1-1.4%.

VIBE outperforms existing ML models in beam selection tasks.

VIBE demonstrates strong generalization across various testbeds and datasets.

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies promise multi-gigabit connectivity for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks, but face challenges in terms of severe path loss and mobility-related beam misalignment. Reliable V2X connectivity requires fast, double-directional beam alignment. However, existing methods suffer from high training overhead and limited generalization to unseen scenarios. This paper presents VIsion-based BEamforming(VIBE), a hybrid model-based, closed-loop, learning architecture for real-time double-directional mmWave beam management primed by camera sensing. VIBE fuses machine learning, model-based reasoning, and closed-loop RF feedback to balance beam-pair establishment latency with link quality. VIBE bypasses exhaustive training overhead and accelerates link establishment by leveraging camera observations to reduce the beam-search space. Lightweight beam refinement and offset tracking mechanisms adaptively refine beams in response to dynamic application requirements. VIBE is implemented and evaluated across online indoor/outdoor testbeds, public datasets, and real-time vehicular experiments, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities, making it suitable for real-time V2X communication. Comparisons with 5G NR hierarchical beamforming show that VIBE consistently maintains lower outage rates. Furthermore, VIBE outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end ML models for beam selection when evaluated on public datasets and achieves outage rates as low as 1.1-1.4 %. The results show that a hybrid model-based, closed-loop learning architecture is better suited for real-world mmWave vehicular connectivity than end-to-end trained ML models. For reproducibility, we publish our code to https://github.com/UNL-CPN-Lab/Look-Once-Beam-Twice.