Fast millimeter-wave beam training with receive beamforming

Abstract

This paper proposes fast millimeter-wave (mm-wave) beam training protocols with receive beamforming. Both IEEE standards and the academic literature have generally considered beam training protocols involving exhaustive search over all possible beam directions for both the beamforming initiator and responded However, this operation requires a long time (and thus overhead) when the beamwidth is quite narrow such as for mm-wave beams (1° in the worst case). To alleviate this problem, we propose two types of adaptive beam training protocols for fixed and adaptive modulation, respectively, which take into account the unique propagation characteristics of millimeter waves. For fixed modulation, the proposed protocol allows for interactive beam training, stopping the search when a local maximum of the power angular spectrum is found that is sufficient to support the chosen modulation/coding scheme. We furthermore suggest approaches to prioritize certain directions determined from the propagation geometry, long-term statistics, etc. For adaptive modulation, the proposed protocol uses iterative multi-level beam training concepts for fast link configuration that provide an exhaustive search with significantly lower complexity. Our simulation results verify that the proposed protocol performs better than traditional exhaustive search in terms of the link configuration speed for mobile wireless service applications.