Geometry Aware Scheme for Initial Access and Control of MmWave Communications in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Immigration to the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands has got the attention of both industry and academia for playing a crucial role in the future 5G wireless networks. Unlike the traditional sub 6 GHz bands, large segments of contiguous spectrum are available at the mmWave bands allowing multi-gigabit data rates transmission. However, signals at mmWave bands are susceptible to harsh propagation and penetration losses which in turn limit its transmission range. Highly directional antennas are employed to compensate the propagation losses by concentrating the signal power towards a specific direction and providing adequate link margin. However, initial access and control of mmWave communications in dynamic environments turns to be a big challenging issue. This is due the fact that, a highly complicated conventional beamforming training (BT) process based on exhaustively searching all beam settings in all possible directions is performed whenever a new initial access or serving beam changing is required. Inspired by the fact that the mmWave communications are location and environmental driven, this paper proposes a geometry-based scheme to alleviate the high complexity of the initial access and control of mmWave communications. Simulations show that the proposed scheme provides a great complexity and energy consumption reduction over the conventional exhaustive-based scheme with comparable link quality performance.