FC-BET: A Fast Consecutive Beam Tracking Scheme for MmWave Vehicular Communications

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a promising technique to meet the demands of data-rate hungry applications in vehicular networks. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and beamforming technique are usually adopted in mmWave communications to overcome the high path and penetration losses. However, the high mobility of vehicles would result in significant beam training overhead in the mmWave vehicular communications. Hence, in this paper, a fast consecutive beam tracking (FC-BET) scheme based on long short-term memory (LSTM) is proposed. By predicting beam angles through the LSTM network consecutively, the overhead caused by frequent beam training in mmWave vehicular communications can be reduced. To evaluate the proposed scheme, a time series channel dataset is built by using sequential vehicle information generated from road traffic simulation software named “Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO)”. Simulation results show that the FCBET scheme can significantly reduce overhead with an acceptable loss in spectral efficiency compared with conventional beam training schemes.