A dual phase genetic algorithm for improved initial access in 5G millimeter wave communication

Abstract

Initial access (IA) in 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is the problem of establishing a directional link between the base station (BS) and the user equipment (UE). For a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where both the BS and UE have many antennas, finding the optimal beams can be prohibitively expensive in terms of delay and computation. In this work, we propose a meta-heuristic approach which is a modified dual-phase genetic algorithm. Since it is a meta-heuristic approach, it is generic and hence does not require extensive modifications to apply to different scenarios, it also does not require context information such as prior knowledge of channel state or statistics of user behavior. The proposed method is using iterative search for the optimal beams, but switch to a different fine-grained search phase on later iterations in order to quickly converge to the local optimum. The effect of this approach is analyzed in terms of capacity achieved vs number of transmit and receive antennas at BS and UE, codebook size, outage probability, total transmitted power, and other parameters specific to this particular dual-phase method. The proposed work has shown improved performance when compared to the existing similar work done in Souto et al. (2019) in terms of capacity achieved (2.12%), reduced power consumption (8.57%), and reduced IA delay (35% to 50%).