Location-Free Beam Prediction in mmWave Systems

Channel charting is a method for creating radio-maps of a cell that capture the neighborhood relationships between User Equipments (UEs) in the cell based on machine learning techniques. In this paper, we leverage channel charting for predicting the best Base Station (BS) beam to serve a given UE in a massive-MIMO 5G network. Because of the autonomous beamforming at the UE in 5G networks, the BS cannot determine the best beam for transmission to a UE by measuring the UE transmissions in all the BS beams. To address this issue, we propose a framework to predict the best BS beam for a mobile UE in the next transmission instant by utilizing the channel charts of the cell that the UE is currently in. We evaluate the prediction accuracy of the framework using simulated channels from QuaDRiGa channel generator. We compare the performance of channel chart and physical location based predictors. While the prediction accuracy attained using channel charting is less than that of the prediction using physical locations, there remain several ways to improve the performance.