Continuous updating of radio environment maps for millimeter-wave networks with beamforming

Mobile stations in future mm-wave communications networks will likely employ beamforming arrays. These networks will require rapid determination and updating of narrow transmit and receive beams. Network-level optimization using cognitive radio techniques requires a protocol in which each station shares some combination of position, transmit beam, and received signal information. Selection of a representation of the transmit beam and the spatial structure of received signals entails a tradeoff between completeness and protocol data rate. In this paper we describe the components of suitable protocols, estimate the associated data rate, and demonstrate that this rate is reasonable even for lossless representations and when the number of beams is very large.