Frequency-Selective Analog Beam Probing for Millimeter Wave Communication Systems

This work focuses on the initial beam acquisition/alignment of millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems. To detect the angle of arrival (AoA) and/or angle of departure (AoD), we propose a training protocol which probes all beamformers from a given codebook simultaneously by exploiting the sparse nature of mmWave channels. By applying a frequency-selective beam probing network, we can map each beamformer from the codebook to different frequencies and a spectral analysis at the receiver allows us to deduce favorable beamformers or AoDs. For practical reasons, we elaborate this idea of steering direction to frequency mapping for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system, i.e., we map each beamformer to specific pilot subcarriers. Under two different hardware designs, we investigate the feasibility of building such beamformer to frequency mappings for one additional radio frequency (RF) chain next to an existing OFDM communication system. We show that parallel beam training is able to achieve better effective transmission rates than exhaustive search in fast-time varying environments due to high temporal efficiency. This is crucial for mmWave communication systems which have access to large beamforming codebooks but suffer from short coherence times due to mobility and high spatial resolution.