mmWave in Vehicular Networks: Leveraging Traffic Signals for Beam Design

Vehicle-to-infrastructure millimeter-wave (mmWave)communication represents a potential solution to capacity shortage in mobile networks. However, effective beam alignment between senders and receivers requires knowledge of the position of vehicles, which is often impractical to obtain in real time. We propose to solve this problem by leveraging the traffic signals, e.g., semaphores, that regulate the vehicular mobility. As an example, we may coordinate beams with red semaphore lights, as they correspond to higher vehicle densities and lower speeds. In order to evaluate such intuition, we propose a mmWave communication model accounting for both the distance and the speed of vehicles being served, and use such a model to compare several beam design strategies. For increased realism, we consider as our reference scenario a large-scale, real-world vehicular trace depicting the mobility in Luxembourg. Our results show that our approach outperforms static beam design based on road topology alone, and, remarkably, it yields a performance comparable to that of solutions based on real-time mobility information.