Motion Aware Beam Tracking in Mobile Millimeter Wave Communications: A Data-Driven Approach

Mobile communications in the millimeter wave band is expected to dramatically increase the network capacity due to the large bandwidth. However, the high propagation loss requires compensation from antenna gains to meet the link budget. Thus, beam-based cell coverage is a critical component in the next generation of wireless communication. The appropriate beam selection induces a unique challenge, when the mobile device is roaming within one cell. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of sensor-aided beam updating approach at the user equipment side, which is validated through experimental data. By decoupling the translation and rotation in various motions, we can further improve the tracking accuracy and reduce the mismatch by 50%. Finally, the overhead simulations are compared based on real sensor measurements given different typical scenarios. Experiment and simulation show that the proposed beam tracking mechanism could dramatically reduce the overhead of beam alignment.