Multi-modal Sensing-aided Beam Management for 6G Communication Systems

The ever-increasing data rate demand of 5G and 6G communication systems can be met by employing key technologies such as upper mid-band and millimeter (mmWave)-band communications. In upper mid and mmWave communications, beamforming techniques realized by multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are used to compensate for severe attenuation due to high diffraction and penetration loss. Unfortunately, the widely used codebook-based beam management techniques require complicated handshaking operations to determine the beam direction which incurs considerable processing latency and energy consumption. To address these issues, we propose the multi-modal beam management (MMBM) technique. The proposed MMBM exploits multi-modal sensing (i.e., LiDAR and RGB camera) along with computer vision (CV) techniques to identify the 3D location of mobile devices. With the 3D position, the base station (BS) can accurately steer directional beams toward the mobile’s position. Since the beam direction is determined without feedback delay or codebook quantization, MMBM achieves performance improvements in terms of data rate and latency. From the simulation results, we show that MMBM improves the sum rate by more than 15% compared to the existing codebook-based beamforming scheme in 5G NR.