Location-Aware Coordinated Beam Alignment in mmWave Communication

Beam alignment is required in mmWave communication to ensure high data transmission with reduced interference. However, system performance can be degraded due to high beam alignment overhead. In this paper, we propose an efficient beam alignment algorithm in mmWaveband communications by exploiting the location information of the mobile user and possible reflectors. The proposed scheme allows the mobile user and the base station to jointly search a small number of beams within the error boundary of the noisy location information, the selected beams are then used to guide the search of future beams. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm does not only improve the performance of the system in the presence of noisy location information but also reduce the beam alignment overhead, power and time resource even with narrow beams. In addition, the results on the achievable rate offer some useful insight on the performances of the proposed algorithm based on the simulations settings.