Motion Sensor Aided Beam Tracking in Mobile Devices of Millimeter-Wave Communications

Millimeter wave (MMwave) in wireless communications has tremendous frequency bandwidth compared with traditional cellular and WLAN bands. As a promising technique of MMwave, multiple- input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, especially beamforming, could greatly improve the system capacity and compensate for the additional path loss in MMwave. However, a perfect beam alignment between the transmitter and receiver needs fine tuning and is vulnerable to different factors such as mobile device movement. In this paper, the widely available motion sensors in mobile devices are employed to mitigate the angle misalignment between the MMwave transmitter and receiver. A new beam alignment mechanism is proposed to reduce the system overhead, given the device attitude information. Experiment and simulation show that the proposed beam tracking mechanism could dramatically reduce the overhead with a minimum computational cost.