Experimental 5G mmWave Beam Tracking Testbed for Evaluation of Vehicular Communications

Upcoming 5G technology has a great potential to enhance cellular networks especially in the field of vehicular communications. Utilizing millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum benefits the ever-growing mobile data traffic, but the more challenging radio channel requires the use of tracking directional antennas. In this paper, we address beamforming and beam tracking to maintain highly capable and robust links to vehicles on the road or rail and in the air as well as in the context of networked indoor robotics. For this reason, a real-time, no overhead tracking method, which focuses on consistently selecting the most promising beam direction as result of a proximity search, is implemented and evaluated on a modular 5G mmWave software-defined radio (SDR) platform. To achieve a controlled environment providing very accurate ground truth of the vehicular movement, we emulate typical mobilities with a mechanical testbed, capable of providing a variety of movement dynamics in a reproducible manner. The experimental setup consists of the high performance SDR radio system operating at 28 GHz including an 8 by 8 beamforming antenna and a specifically developed mechanical testbed. The results demonstrate the feasibility of reliably providing multi-gigabit network access to vehicles with various mobilities by wireless links at mmWave frequency.