A Low-complexity Beam Searching Method for Fast Handover in MmWave Vehicular Networks

MmWave communication is very promising for the vehicular network, where high data rate for exchanging sensory data as well as high-quality entertainment video streaming is required. In mmWave vehicular networks, handover occurs more frequently due to the mobility of vehicles and the sensitivity of mmWave beams to the dynamic blockage and deafness. However, beam re-sweeping is required during the handover process, due to the directional beamforming adopted in mmWave vehicular networks, which is very time-consuming. Hence, in this paper, we propose a base stations (BSs) coordination based beam selection method to facilitate fast handover for the connected vehicles. We exploit the angle information extracted from the beam codewords of previous serving BS to refine the beam searching space of targeting BS, which possesses low complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce the size of beam searching space of target BS.