학술논문

Grid-Free MIMO Beam Alignment Through Site-Specific Deep Learning
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun. Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on. 23(2):908-921 Feb, 2024
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Sensors
Millimeter wave communication
Antenna arrays
Deep learning
Wireless communication
Training
MIMO communication
5G mobile communication
beam management
deep learning
millimeter wave communication
Language
ISSN
1536-1276
1558-2248
Abstract
Beam alignment is a critical bottleneck in millimeter wave communication. An ideal beam alignment technique should achieve high beamforming gain with low latency, scale well to systems with higher carrier frequencies, larger antenna arrays and multiple user equipment, and not require hard-to-obtain context information. These qualities are collectively lacking in existing methods. We depart from the conventional codebook-based (CB) approach where the optimal beam is chosen from quantized codebooks and instead propose a grid-free beam alignment method that directly synthesizes the transmit and receive beams from the continuous search space using measurements from a few site-specific probing beams found via a deep learning pipeline. In realistic settings, the proposed method achieves a far superior signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-latency trade-off compared to the CB baselines: it aligns near-optimal beams 100x faster or equivalently finds beams with 10–15 dB higher average SNR in the same number of searches, relative to an exhaustive search over a conventional codebook.