Enabling Situational Awareness in Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Situational awareness in wireless networks refers to the availability of position information on transmitters and receivers as well as information on their propagation environments to aid wireless communications. In millimeter wave massive multiple-input multiple-output communication systems, situational awareness can significantly improve the quality and robustness of communications. In this paper, we establish a model that describes the statistical dependencies between channel state information and the position, orientation, and clock offset of a user equipment along with the locations of features in the propagation environment. Based on this model, we introduce COMPAS (COncurrent Mapping, Positioning, And Synchronization); an inference engine that can provide accurate and reliable situational awareness in millimeter wave massive multiple-input multiple-output communication systems. Numerical results show that COMPAS is able to infer the positions of an unknown and time-varying number of features in the propagation environment and, at the same time, estimate the position, orientation, and clock offset of a user equipment.