Robust Location-Aided Beam Alignment in Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO

Abstract: Location-aided beam alignment has been proposed recently as a potential approach for fast link establishment in millimeter wave (mmWave) massive MIMO (mMIMO) communications. However, due to mobility and other imperfections in the estimation process, the spatial information obtained at the base station (BS) and the user (UE) is likely to be noisy, degrading beam alignment performance. In this paper, we introduce a robust beam alignment framework in order to exhibit resilience with respect to this problem. We first recast beam alignment as a decentralized coordination problem where BS and UE seek coordination on the basis of correlated yet individual position information. We formulate the optimum beam alignment solution as the solution of a Bayesian team decision problem. We then propose a suite of algorithms to approach optimality with reduced complexity. The effectiveness of the robust beam alignment procedure, compared with classical designs, is then verified on simulation settings with varying location information accuracies.