On-Off Arbitrary Beam Synthesis and Non-Interactive Beam Management for Phased Antenna Array Communications

Abstract

In this paper, we study the beam synthesis and management methods for the phased antenna array-based wireless communications systems, e.g., 5 G mmWave communications. First, we propose a novel on-off beam synthesis method that can synthesize any given on-off beam pattern. The proposed method maximizes the beam power towards a given set of on-directions while suppressing the power towards all off-directions. Second, by using a set of beams synthesized by the proposed on-off beam synthesis method, we design a non-interactive hierarchical beam management algorithm that can greatly reduce the radio resource usage, feedback overhead, and the latency of the beam discovery, compared to the exhaustive beam search algorithms. Since the proposed beam management algorithm is non-interactive, it can be applied to the initial access as well as the beam tracking, and is especially useful for supporting a massive number of devices. Finally, we show the validness of the proposed beam synthesis and management methods by conducting experiments on a phased antenna array experimental testbed.