Data-Driven Multi-armed Beam Tracking for Mobile Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems

Abstract

The goal of the next-generation mobile communication system is higher data-rates, lower latency, and higher energy-efficient performance, which bring about the demands for fast beam tracking in time-varying mobile communication. With the development of large-scale antenna array technology, highly directional beams can be formed with limited radio frequency chains. However, traditional exhaustive searching scheme has unacceptable overhead that leads to great challenges for applying to mobile millimeter-wave environments. Fast beam tracking scheme therefore has been recognized as a key technology in millimeter wave communication. To address this issue, this paper proposes a data-driven multi-armed beam tracking scheme to select the beamforming/combining vectors that achieve the target quality of service based on the real-time measurement, rather than the prior knowledge such as channel and user mobility information in beamforming design. To further speed up the beam tracking process, multi-armed beam is created to sample multiple spatial directions simultaneously. Simulation results show that the proposed data-driven multi-armed beam tracking method could achieve fast beam tracking performance with high resolution and reduced training overhead.