Low Overhead Beam Alignment for Mobile Millimeter Channel Based on Continuous-Time Prediction

Abstract: In millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, directional transmission based on beamforming is important to compensate for high pathloss. To maintain the desired direction transmission gain, beam scanning that involves the transmitter sending the pilot signal over all available beam directions to find the optimal beam is often considered. Alternatively, beam tracking using partial beams can save the beam training overhead through algorithms such as statistical analysis models and kalman filter (KF). Unfortunately, existing beam tracking solutions are limited to a fixed beam variation pattern. In this work, we propose an adaptive online beam alignment (AOBA) scheme, which aims to reduce training overhead and achieve accurate beam alignment for any movement profile. The proposed AOBA periodically performs beam tracking using a small amount but carefully selected candidate beams and switches to beam scanning using all available beams based on a given switching rule. During the interval without the pilot signal, the optimal beam at an arbitrary time instant is predicted with the aid of the recently proposed ordinary differential equation (ODE)-long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed AOBA in comparison with several existing beam alignment schemes.