Location Information Assisted mmWave Hybrid Beamforming Scheme for 5G-Enabled UAVs

Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into the cellular network as the aerial users is a promising solution to meet their ever-increasing communication demands in a wide range of applications. Compared with the terrestrial users, the aerial users suffer more interference, and the quality of the downlink communication cannot be guaranteed. Due to the advantages of the millimeter-wave massive MIMO technology, we consider applying it to provide downlink communication services for UAVs, and both beam tracking and inter-beam interference cancellation are the keys for UAVs. This paper proposes a two-stage hybrid beamforming technique assisted by location information. In the first stage, the base station selects the appropriate beam codeword according to the location information of the UAVs; in the second stage, the base station obtains the equivalent digital domain channel matrix on the basis of the beam selection result in the first stage, and the digital beamforming is performed based on the ZF criterion. Extensive simulation experiments are carried out on the proposed scheme to verify the performance of our proposed beam tracking and inter-beam interference cancellation techniques.